I do not know Trayvon Martin. I don’t know members of his family. I don’t know what the town of Sanford, Florida is like. I do not know George Zimmerman. But what I do know is that there are many many Sanfords out there, many George Zimmermans, and unfortunately many young black men like Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant, who met untimely and unjustified deaths. Young men who were in the act of just trying to live in what appears to be, more and more, a world they cannot call their own.
In the U.S. many people, young and old, across-the-board racially and culturally, are killed by gun violence in this country. We have come to accept it as a fact of life. Our laws permit the carrying of guns, and we have become numb to the senselessness of it all. We Americans are anesthetized to and by the violence that is, it seems, our principal cultural expression. But this column is not about guns, or anti-gun laws, the NRA, or anything on large political themes that I normally cover. This is personal.
If there’s any one tableau in our life that perfectly embodies the death of hope, it is the funeral of a child. Even more so when that child is killed by an act of violence. These things don’t need to happen. It’s not a comprehensible event. We don’t, in our right minds, want to imagine that it happens, but it does. I’m not sure if any of you have been to the funeral of a young black man, or anyone for that matter, killed by a gun. I have. In that case, his death was an instance of black-on-black crime, committed by members of a gang.
Before they shot him, they were engaged in illegal activity on the street. The young man was just passing by, coming through the neighborhood the day after Christmas to return some presents at a department store. He was shot because he could identify people. Another day in the life in America. The greatest sadness one feels when you’re at this kind of funeral is not for the adults, but for the kids, that young man’s peers, who are not only mourning the loss of their friend, but looking over their shoulders instead of straight ahead towards their future. Nobody deserves that kind of despair — living in fear for your life simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or simply by being.