{"id":55018,"date":"2012-03-27T17:00:25","date_gmt":"2012-03-27T21:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=55018"},"modified":"2012-03-27T23:34:27","modified_gmt":"2012-03-28T03:34:27","slug":"this-is-personal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/fe-911-2\/this-is-personal\/","title":{"rendered":"This Is Personal"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0But 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.<\/p>\n

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In the U.S. many people, young and old, across-the-board racially and culturally, are killed\u00a0by gun violence\u00a0in 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0I’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.\u00a0In that case, his death was an instance of\u00a0black-on-black crime, committed by members of a gang.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0He 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.<\/p>\n

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Before I proceed any further, I am in no position to speak on behalf of African-Americans in this country. I am not African-American. The struggles inherent in my cultural and ethnic experience are a mere shadow compared to the history of struggle experienced by a vast majority of people who began their journey here treated not as immigrants, but as property. It is in these roots that I struggle to comprehend the injustice of Trayvon’s death, and the history of so much unresolved trauma resulting from the treatment of human beings as commodities. Call it my Chironian hunch, but something deep says that the response to Trayvon’s death has the same feel and intensity as the response ignited by the suicide death of Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian merchant, who set himself on fire out of despair because of police oppression and corruption. It was Mohamed’s death that triggered Arab Spring. I pray that just this once this time, this isn’t me grasping at straws.<\/p>\n

The history of violence in our country and the original sins of cultural genocide and slavery are still un-repented. We are far from a post-racial society. We are further embedded in a very racist one. If there are deep wounds in this country’s psyche, these two are the deepest and the\u00a0most unequivocally\u00a0painful. I, for one, continue taking this very personally. I want this to come up for healing. Once and for all.<\/p>\n

I’m making this column short and sweet, because it’s time for us to start talking. I’ve made my peace, and want to hear yours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0But 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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1740],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55018"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}