March Madness

I don’t really care if people stop reading “What’s the Diehl?” because you’re tired of negative news. It’s not like I’ll be forced to take a pay cut.

It’s despicable that in this day and age, a fat, dumb racist with a gun can shoot an innocent, unarmed 17-year-old black kid in the chest, killing him, and not even spend 10 minutes inside a jail cell.

I like to write about topics that others aren’t writing about and I try to refrain from jumping on bandwagons but the Trayvon Martin case is different. I feel obligated to add my voice to the many others decrying the way in which this situation has been handled by the incompetent Keystone Cops of Sanford, Florida.

George Zimmerman

Hopefully you’ve heard about how 28-year-old George Zimmerman, a cop-wannabe who carried a 9 mm handgun while patrolling his gated community as a Neighborhood Watch captain, came upon Trayvon last February 26 and shot him in the chest outside of his family’s home. (Trayvon was from Miami; he was visiting his dad, stepmom and little brother.)

Trayvon had just returned from the local 7-Eleven with Skittles and an iced tea when he was spotted by Zimmerman, who decided he was acting “suspicious” and called 911. Even though the dispatcher told him not to approach Trayvon, to wait for police, Zimmerman ignored the directive and shot the kid in cold blood.

Zimmerman, who wasn’t even arrested, let alone charged, claimed that he reacted in self-defense when shooting Trayvon even though the high school junior had no weapon and posed no threat. Police declined to charge him because “there are no grounds to disprove his story of what happened.”

Which story is that, you bumbling idiots? The one where Zimmerman ignored the emergency dispatcher’s instructions and gunned down an innocent high school kid (who happened to be black) for no frikkin’ reason?

It’s good that this story is receiving media attention – unlike so many others involving African-Americans in this country. Hopefully the police will reverse themselves and emphasize justice over protecting a dumbass who shouldn’t have been allowed to leave his home unsupervised, let alone patrol his neighborhood with a loaded handgun.

It’s bad that we seem to be going backwards as a people – to a time when killing “the coloreds” was no big deal, women couldn’t control their own bodies but were expected to be barefoot and pregnant, and politicians appealed to the worst in voters and took an “us vs. them” approach to campaigning and governing.

Talk about March Madness.

Sources: ABC News, Globalgrind.com, CBS News.