Everytime I encounter more news about Trayvon Martin, I'm somehow reminded of Rachel Corrie's words:
"I can't believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry. It hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be.... Disbelief and horror is what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not what they are asking for now. This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when I was two and looked at Capitol Lake and said 'This is the wide world and I'm coming to it.'"
Stories like this make me feel disappointed, not in the unenlightened cops, but in our failure to enlighten them. Our failure to protect Trayvon Martin who needed the protection of a precious cultural asset prescislely because he was a young, black man. Maybe it is naïveté on my part to feel disappointed and even surprised, but I do. I am. How can this continue to happen in my seemingly enlightened world? How have we come so far as a people, but not nearly far enough? I do not accept it. But I don't know what to do.
What do we do? I'm truly asking.
