fear does not make right. it should not make might.

yeah. so i will be the 7 billionth person to make a comment about the george zimmerman verdict. it was disgusting. and i'm not really sure how the jury members will be able to sleep at night ever again. i say i don't know how, but i also know they will. i know that they, in their minds, believe their decision was right, and they, in their minds, understood george zimmerman's fear of a skittles-weilding black kid in a neighborhood, where he didn't, in george zimmerman's mind, belong.

and since they believe they were right, they will be able to sleep.

but how how awful is it that they believe they were right? the racism here is so thick you could cut it with a knife. it's almost a bigger racism than george zimmerman's- in that george zimmerman at least was "in the heat of a moment." they were not. they were sitting in complete safety and comfort in an air conditioned courtroom. there was no inkling of a reason for them to feel george zimmerman's alleged fear. but they did. and that's how deep below the skin surface the racism in this country is.

just the fact that we even have a stand your ground rule is a horrible thing, i think. and very likely has it's roots in fear. and racism is a fuel for fear. and fear, a fuel for racism. i mean, i can understand the idea that if someone is actually attacking you, you have the right to fight back. but if someone is NOT attacking you, adn you only percieve that someone is or will, then really you should have no right to an attack or a chase based on your fears.

and what kind of an attack does it have to be? i feared once that a boss was threatening me. it threatened my family's livelihood- (actually it was true.) did that give me the right to go after her? a guy dumped me once, because of a mistaken belief on his part. it hurt me more than anything ever had. it threatened my very life, i felt so suicidal. it certainly felt like an attack of my nervous system. does that give me the right to hurt him back? or to try to destroy his life?

the problem is partly that perception is not always reality. and we can't live in an "eye for a percieved eye" world. and even when reality is the perception, please, we can't live (we can't all survive) in "an eye for an eye" world.

we need a justice system. not a vigilante system. and not a Wild West system.

i read a short story once about a one death wish rule. the people in the story were given one free pass to kill whomever they wanted to kill with no consequences guaranteed here or in the here-after. and the story gave me some pause, because quite actually there is someone i would kill if i knew there would never be any consequences. it makes me shudder, thinking that i would. if i could. how horrible is it to know this about yourself? what's interesting though, is that it never gave me any pause to think about how a rule like that would also give someone else a free pass to kill me if they hated me or feared me. and wanted me dead. i never thought about that. maybe because i know that the only person who has ever hated me that much now hates me much more- hates me to the point that he doesn't think about me one way or another. i'm not a person he wants to kill, i'm worse- i am nobody. so i don't feel worried that someone will come after me.

but what if you're a person or among a group of people who are feared so immensely, that people have worked up a hatred for you? and through that hatred, they've worked up an even greater fear of you? or anyone that looked like you. what if?

there used to be a guy who lived in my hometown. who, very likely, was schizophrenic. i can't say for sure, as i didn't have access to a diagnosis. all i know is that everyone believed he was crazy. he stood out, in that he was always alone and he was either staring some blank stare or he was staring menacingly at others and mumbling stuff to himself. sometimes he's shout out some declaration of something or other. he wore big baggy lumpy clothes even in the dead of summer. if anyone ever ventured to actually talk to him, he more or less snarled at them. so,i, myself, believed he was crazy, and i often wondered why in the hell his family didn't find some safe supervision for him. i remember thinking that if i had a child (even if he was an adult) i would never allow him to be unsupervised. maybe that's a violation of a mentally ill person's rights, but i also believe that if you are a caretaker for someone with a mental illness, you have to consider the safety of others. anyway i had a fear of him and what he might do, to the point that i turned my children away from a local ice cream stand once, and directed us to another, because i saw him come in the door. when my then husband asked me why; i said, "i just don't want our children to be there when he decides to take out the village."

turns out later, he hung himself. and i remember thinking "thank god, he took that way. instead of taking others with him." and maybe that's a very callous thought. he was someone's child after all. but still that was how great my percieved fear of him was. i was glad when he was dead and gone and hadn't hurt anyone else in the process.

but here's the thing- while i was afraid of him, and i did percieve him as a threat to others where-ever he was, whether he was packing skittles or not, i also never felt that it was my right to take him or any other mentally ill person out of this world. i never felt it was my right to stand my ground in the ice cream store. no matter how much fear i had of him. i felt i had an obligation to keep my kids safe and leave the ground, but i didn't feel a justification to stand our ground.

one more story. one time my grandson was with his mother in a local shopping center. i believe he was all of 4 or 5 years old. and he wasn't doing anything. just standign by his mother. suddenly a person who was on a group home (for cognitively disabled) outing to the store, came after him and hit him. walloped him. for no good reason whatsoever. seems to me in a stand your ground kind of situation, it would have been well within my daughter in law's rights to strike back at this person, who hurt her child. it seems with a stand your ground rule, it would have been within her rights to kill the person. and it seems to me that it would now still be within her rights to have such a percieved fear of anyone who looks cognitively challenged, that she could take out any mentally challenged person she ever encountered.

after all, all you have to do now is percieve the fear, and it is justfiable in a court of law to take the law into your own hands. it's disgusting.