I'm not a lawyer. If I were, I wouldn't be writing this because I would have killed myself. That is what I think lawyers should do. They should kill themselves. That's right. If you are a lawyer and you're reading this, please go and do this immediately. Thanks. Be sure to do it in as messy a way as possible causing the maximum amount of psychological distress to whoever finds your twisted and gooey corpse so that you can posthumously spread just a little bit more misery around before you descend to the ninth level of Dante's Inferno where you belong. *
I'm prefacing my remarks with this because unlike half of the armchair quarterbacks on social media I don't pretend to understand the labyrinthine mechanics of our justice system, the Stand Your Ground law and whatnot. Thanks again lawyers. Thanks a fucking bunch. But I am a human being with the requisite empathy that a member of society should possess and therefore do think it is tragic that another human being lost his life due to a feedback loop of fear and aggression that could have easily been avoided.
That's the thing about this situation that is truly annoying to me: people seem to be so caught up in identifying with whatever subdivision of humanity they have inserted themselves into that they are missing the point. This is the dominant problem of our society as I see it and until we learn to think properly the same problems will continue to arise. People will be killed by other people that have dehumanised them to the point that they are able to do the unthinkable. How is this done? Personhood is trumped by a generic label that makes them into an 'other'.
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| Well I suppose that could be worse. |
Why do we keep doing this when it is so detrimental to our society? Is it because we just can't help it? Nah. We can do better. We choose not to. It has always been easier to herd animals once you tag them and train them to respond to a bell or some similar signal, and our entire culture is a huge Pavlovian dinner bell.
We should be aspiring to more than the
default factory settings our circumstances of birth have dictated to us, and it
should be obvious by now that those institutions that want to reinforce our
identity with certain demographics have some nefarious reason for doing so.
Religious leaders want to create divisions within cultures so that fear of The Devil keeps the flock filing through the doors of the church and putting money
in the collection plate every Sunday. The Union leader castigates The Scabs so
that the dues keep coming in. The Republican leaders reminisce about ‘the Good
Old Days’ which is really just a code phrase for ‘the Days Before Women and
Minorities Got a Voice in Politics’to ensure that scared white men will continue to make campaign donations. And clearly the Media has a vested interest in fomenting class and race tensions for the same reason that they love hurricanes. When shit hits the fan people stay glued to their televisions.It
is obvious that leaders that seek to divide us into little subgroups are doing
so merely to control us. The question is Why do we allow it?
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| Damn straight. |
The answer is that people naturally gravitate towards other people that physically resemble them. We tend to trust those that have the same skin colour and features as us, and ostracise those that are different. It's easy. But just like it took us a couple of thousand years to break the whole ‘clubbing each other over the head for fun’ habit, this tendency can be overcome with diligence, if we cared enough to bother. The Powers that Be have no interest in people thinking before they act. They desire a reactionary and id driven society that they can manipulate and sell stupid products to. This after all is the basis of our economy: impulse shopping and ‘retail therapy’. The kind of people that think things through and weigh the consequences of their actions scare the shit out of them. They make for bad t.v. If George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin had better impulse control this would be a slow news week indeed. Of course we don't really expect a teenager to have mastered his impulses as much as a grown ass man, and I can't help thinking that Zimmerman losing sleep over the idea of armed vigilantes coming to get him has a cosmic symmetry.
This is funny because the white people in it don't actually kill anybody.
