CSotD: The only thing we have to fear
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Matt Bors on the Trayvon Martin shooting.
The shooting has provided an opportunity to watch the responses of a variety of cartoonists, though, to be honest, I haven't seen any defending what happened.
But I've seen some that take one element and run with it, including a lot of "guns are bad" cartoons that base their criticism on the argument that a revolver is shaped much like the state of Florida. I assume these cartoonists are hoping that, if anyone ever gets strangled with a mitten, it happens in Michigan.
Others have gone for the race angle, which is certainly present and deserves to be addressed, but attacking Zimmerman and putting every gun owner or even every gun owner obsessed with crime on the same level seems to miss the big picture and, worse than that, given the lack of support for what happened, it alienates people who, at the moment, might make good allies.
Which is to say that, while I agree with Rob Rogers that this is much like the lynchings that were common in the South a generation or two ago, I don't think his take on the shooting does much to advance the conversation.
I'm much more in sympathy with a couple of cartoons — including this one by Lalo Alcaraz — that, even before the president spoke his mind yesterday, cited the fear of black parents for their sons. It is not right that they should feel compelled to carefully instruct their young men on how to avoid being shot or beaten by the police on the street.
It is not fair that, a half century after the murder of Emmett Till, they should still fear that their sons will become the innocent victims of regulators and racist vigilantes.
It is not fair that they should live with a constant sense in the back of their heads that maybe their son won't come home one night.
But Bors manages to tie up several elements of the incident into a compact package by looking beyond the specifics of the case and getting right down to the root issue: We have written laws to protect people against the consequences of their own irrational responses to their own irrational fear.
Or — more precisely — we have written laws that provide people with a sense that society and the law approve of their insane, unreasonable response to fear.
Zimmerman is not off the hook yet, and it seems likely that he won't get off the hook — but that is thanks, not to the power of law to create a sane, safe world for us all, but to the persistence of those who would not let this outrage go unmarked, and thanks also to a strong evidence trail, without which it would be hard to prosecute him, given the "Stand Your Ground" law.
The problem is not Zimmerman. The problem is the law that he thought justified his actions.
Note that, in the first panel, the vigilante does not cite race, but merely fear. Bors does not duck the race issue, but portrays it in a way that makes it a factor, but not the critical factor.
While it would be naive to suggest that Martin's race was not decisive in this particular case, dwelling on that, as so many have, misses a greater point which Bors addresses:
We cannot live in a society that not merely excuses, but gives actual legal sanction to, violent responses to irrational fear.
Unless, y'know, we're all going to be allowed to kill the things we fear.
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