It has already been said. Go ahead. Look at your facebook feed. Chances are, any sentiment that I could express has already been expressed. The feelings have already been felt.

I won’t express my desire to see Zimmerman gunned down. I don’t want to see it. I want it to happen, but I don’t want to bear witness to it. I don’t want to see him laying lifeless on the grass. I don’t want to hear his screams. Though I feel he deserves to scream, I don’t wish him the indignity of becoming the posthumous butt of a national joke (although he surely will become just that one day.) No memes that mock him as he finally came to rest after that short struggle.

I’ve unfriended people. There are guys that I used to know from high school. All I knew about them now was what appeared on their facebook pages, but I remember them. It was a redneck school, and they fit the stereotype, but they were good dudes with good hearts. Now they are family men, like me. Raising children whom they love, like me. And Trayvon’s parents.

One had a beard and wore black, like one of the guys from Sons of Anarchy. He carried a gun, which is perfectly legal in Pennsylvania. And he didn’t get what the big deal was. Because even though he dressed like some of the most violent dudes in American history – the one percent biker gangs- he assumed that a young black kid in a hoodie is a greater threat than he. I don’t believe for a second that my old friend from Penncrest is that easily intimidated. But you only talk about intimidation when you are talking about other people. Trayvon was gunned down like a dog, not a person. Dogs don’t have to be so much of a threat. All they have to be is off of a leash.

I get it. I need to tell my kids to watch their backs. Find out what my grandfather told his sons when it came down to dealing with folks from the South during Jim Crow. “…Don’t look no white man in the eye. Nod and keep on walking…” or something to that affect. Because that trial had the stink of “Don’t yaw’ll get out of line, y’here?”

But then I remember someone telling me, “Just because someone tells you that you’re something, doesn’t make it so.” It was such a third grade kind of thing that I had forgotten it until this morning. Just because this verdict tells me that Black men are animals, and that our murders are justified, always and by whomever, doesn’t make it so. Spread the word. They can make me mourn that child, and I can want to bang on our corpse of a justice system, but they can’t make me bow my head. I won’t scrape.

All they can do is treat us like second class citizens, but this is nothing new. We never did get that first class upgrade.

But I said I’m not going to write about Trayvon, and I’m not. I’m done.
Rest in Peace. And may your family find peace on this world as well.