comes to town

yet again

It’s time for yet another lesson in Occam’s Razor, the principle that holds that the simplest explanation that fits all the facts is likely to be the accurate one.

This one comes courtesy of a trigger-happy idiot in Florida, a dead black kid and an apparently inept police department.

The problem with cases like that of Trayvon Martin’s death is that the back-and-forth quickly becomes tiresome, obscuring the only really salient fact of the tragedy: a 17-year-old boy is dead for reasons that were at best unnecessary and at worst criminal.

When you’ve been in the news business as long as I have, you’ve seen a thousand of these kinds of stories and they’re all basically the same. Somebody does something stupid, with tragic results. People of certain political stripes fall all over themselves trying to excuse the stupid person (remember, stupid is as stupid does), politicians try to make hay over the controversy (especially in an election year) and, in the end, a family is left with a gaping hole where its loved one once was.

A 17-year-old boy is dead for reasons that were at best unnecessary and at worst criminal.

Like most such stories, the aftermath of this just doesn’t pass the smell test. People who want to exonerate Trayvon Martin’s killer are coming up with all kinds of discrete “facts” to cloud the issue. That George Zimmerman apparently has a local team of people who are dribbling out “exonerating” facts – including a black friend, which has the aroma of, “Hey, I didn’t shoot the kid; some of my best friends are black” – indicates that he has a savvy lawyer, one who knows as much about how to release facts as he does about the law. Defense lawyers know that complexity is their friend and ally, and the more “facts” that come out, the more a fog of complexity will accumulate, especially when they dribble out slowly.

And of course, there’s the disgusting spectacle of politicians jumping all over it. President Obama makes a rather moving statement of sympathy for the family at a press briefing on another matter and idiots like Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich jump all over him, instead of engaging in the kind of sympathetic silence anybody with any class would use. Gingrich, in particular, apparently hasn’t learned his lesson; this was the guy, remember, who blamed Susan Smith’s murder of her children on Democratic policies.

And don’t even get me started on chuckleheads like Geraldo Rivera, who found a way to blame the victim’s death on what he was wearing at the time. Even Geraldo’s own kid told him he was an idiot.

All those things serve to obscure the really important fact: A 17-year-old boy is dead for reasons that were at best unnecessary and at worst criminal.

Some of the most important questions have less to do with the murder itself than with the events leading up to it. What, for example, was Zimmerman doing running around with a gun? Sure, he was a big kahuna in the local Neighborhood Watch program. But Neighborhood Watch programs aren’t a license for vigilantes. The idea is that if you’re on Neighborhood Watch and you see something or somebody suspicious, you call the police. You don’t grab your heater and go chasing after the suspected bad person. (There’s apparently also a contention that when Zimmerman approached the kid the weapon was concealed. Could anybody really believe that? You see somebody suspicious, you grab a gun and approach the person and keep the gun under wraps? Come on.)

Now, granted the Sanford Police Department is, by all appearances, made up of Barney Fife clones. I find it hard to believe, though, that they encourage the Neighborhood Watches they help organize to run around with guns. Hell, that’s not even a good idea from the standpoint of police safety, let alone from the standpoint of 17-year-old kids in hoodies with a late-night yen for a cold drink and some candy.

And if the local PD is so bad that the Neighborhood Watch folks feel they have to arm themselves, maybe they ought to think about getting rid of the current cops and hiring some new ones.

Dreary as the surrounding events have become, it’s been at least somewhat encouraging to see a national push for justice in the matter. George Zimmerman may be an evil, horrible person, or he may just be an idiot (my money’s on the latter). Either way, somebody has to be called to account for what happened on a dark Florida night. Somebody, in short, has to pay. Still, that won’t stop it from happening again. Probably in Florida.

Yes, the whole event raises a lot of questions. Questions of race. Questions of gun control. Questions of police competency. We don’t know enough about what really happened to answer those questions yet. Chances are, we’ll never really know. Besides, we’ve been struggling with some of those questions for generations and we’re still no closer to an answer.

But we do know one thing, and it’s the most important thing. It’s something we really shouldn’t forget, although somehow, I suspect we will.

A 17-year-old boy is dead for reasons that were at best unnecessary and at worst criminal.