I wasn't really able to think about Trayvon Martin for the first few days. Or rather, I was thinking about it--because the story was unavoidable--but I didn't really have any intelligible, complete thoughts about it for a while.
What I've settled on, more or less, is that what happened was nothing more or less than a lynching. Whether George Zimmerman was white is beside the point, and whether Trayvon was armed or not is beside the point. A racist saw a black person somewhere he didn't think he belonged, so he set about getting rid of him. The Stand Your Ground law is beside the point as well, in a way; maybe Trayvon would still be alive in Zimmerman had only had access to a tire iron or something, but the impetus is more troubling to me than the excuse.
In any event, even once my perspective on the case had been formed, it didn't seem likely that I'd be bringing it up here. There's nothing to laud about a law enforcement establishment that refused to arrest Zimmerman but decided to drug test Trayvon's corpse; that wouldn't fire the police chief but would leak "damaging" factoid's about Trayvon's school record.
That Congressman Bobby Rush wore sunglasses and a hoodie onto the floor today, in violation of House rules, doesn't really mean much to me in the grand scheme of things. As sound as the point it raises might be, it's feels kind of petty and beneath a member of Congress, especially since it gave others an excuse to ignore his speech in favor of shouting him down and escorting him off the floor. But I'm willing to concede that I like it in theory, so that's a good enough excuse as far as I'm concerned.
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