Dear Mr. Zimmerman,
Holy Moses George this country has had ourselves a wild past couple of years but this not guilty verdict of yours has to be the ribbon on top of another “how the hell did we get here?” year. The kind of year that seems to keep screaming WAKE UP!!! in everyone’s faces yet we still stay stuck. A year that featured mass shootings from California to Connecticut, drone strikes that have killed 4 Americans and countless others as well, a status quo still seemingly more obsessed with money and power than looking out for our fellow-man…..
Everywhere I look I see people lost in their own thoughts….struggling to find a new reason to believe they will eventually break through and find enough supply, providence, and security to feel like they’ve ‘made it’…..
but,I have no idea what making it means George.
To me just having the opportunity to fight another day for my dreams, my family, my loved ones, my savior….that is enough. If others try to get in the way of that pursuit….be it discouraging mentally or physically….I have learned that the most expedient way to get my desired result (absolute freedom to be me) is to not fight back and find a way to appeal to the one love I believe has created us all and strike some form of harmonious accord with my attacker….that’s how i was raised George….it’s how I was taught since birth.
I don’t know how you were raised Mr. Zimmerman….to be honest I don’t know much about you at all….what I do know with certainty is that you have gone on record saying that you would have done nothing different if you could reconsider taking the life of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and that you admit that you did extinguish it by bullet to his heart.
Even the very thought of shooting someone in the heart makes me squeamish as hell!
How on earth would you not try to find a way to incapacitate the boy without severely injuring or killing him? What good could his maiming or death possibly do for the world? That’s someone’s son you just killed. Even if he was attempting to kill you as you allege he was, why would you (the much older, larger, and hopefully wiser man) not want to at least try to knock him out instead of shoot him? Seriously George, why?
Since the verdict came out I have to say I’ve seen what your defenders are like Bud, and if I were you I would make a point of publicly distancing yourself from all the racist xenophobes who are now your torchbearers. Racists everywhere rejoiced watching the black boy get what was coming to him and relishing the way this almost made up for O.J. getting a mulligan after beheading his white wife.
We the public are extra guilty of only sticking our necks out and crying for social justice when extenuating factors like racial stereotyping and white on black hate crimes are involved. When its two black kids shooting each other it barely makes the papers. I say that callously, but it’s sadly true.
Black folks have been outraged since your not guilty verdict George but they don’t seem to be as adamant about bringing all the black on black violence to an end as well….to vilify you is to take a hard look at anyone who has needlessly taken the life of another.
Right after the Not Guilty verdict came over the wires I put this emotionally reactive post up on Facebook.
“No matter the verdict I will teach my son that The George Zimmerman Trial was a great travesty in American justice & that our country seems to only value human life when a white child gets murdered. This is a travesty of the highest order. Trayvon Martin should be alive today. Mr. Zimmerman has ironically made me feel entirely less safe in general when a murder this obvious goes unpunished. I hope this keeps him up at night for as long as it takes for him to accept credit for his actions and symbolically rectify the damage he has done to our nation’s collective subconscious.”
It got 47 likes George.
But more unfortunately it also got me called a ‘bleeding heart fag’ and told to ‘go eat a fat, hairy, hippie dick with my “liberal fag friends”. What is the world coming to when we make it an us or them decision all the time Bud? I cannot fathom why we can’t find ways to minimize if not outright eradicate violent confrontation and killing from our ethos entirely.
Even though we forget sometimes it is important to reflect on the words of the great prophets before us and see the universal message that unites us: love is the answer, love is all around us, we have unlimited access to it and it’s free. True love is motherfucking priceless!
I apologize for the m.f. bomb there Mr. Zimmerman I am not hoping to offend you.
My main objective is to lobby you to reconsider your prior standpoint and not think it okay to do something like what you did over again for any reason whatsoever…..in my mind it’s better to die for the righteous cause of unconditional love, tolerance, and peace then take a single life in the name of justice.
I firmly believe you could have saved Trayvon that night George, even if that meant restraining him until the police came and the whole track record of calling the police and reporting people for acting shady before is odd. Why the need to hyperfocus on the problems? teenagers need guidance…even the ones on blunts and gangsta lean…
especially them
latchkey kids need big brothers not BIG BROTHER.
n’ah mean?
Most of my thoughts on verdicts like Yours or O.J’s. or Casey Anthony’s is the fact that all 3 of these individuals were significantly weaker than their killers (with the 2 year old girl being the most pronounced)
You are a grown man George.
I’m guessing you weigh 200+ pounds that boy looks like a twig in those pictures…and I know the liberal media showed younger cuter pics of him on most of their broadcasts…the older wannabe gangster ones too…..I’m a pacifist and I know full well that unless that kid had a weapon I would win a wrestling match with him….that the extra 75 pounds and 5 inch reach differential…I must be naive to not think you were anything less than courageous doing your citizen on patrol routine that night.
It surely is a knee jerk to think you were merely racially profiling another black kid but I did have that thought when you have such a grand track record of legal rabble rousing that knee jerk seems relatively justified…but let’s say you were just doing your best to keep the neighborhood safe George…how does shooting someone in the heart make the neighborhood safer in any way? if anything the passion you’ve incited around the country and the world at large makes me feel significantly less safe.
Don’t you see?
The stand your ground law is a step backwards into the stone age where Moses’s eye for an eye verdict still reigns supreme.
This is the new world.
A brave new one.
I still wholeheartedly believe that love and forgiveness and mercy and peacekeeping initiatives have been and will continue to be the only way to save ourselves from ourselves. We are a truly divine and inspired people.
We are capable of doing amazingly lovely things in the name of truth and justice.
Turning the other cheek.
Loving our enemy.
Forgiving our attackers.
That is truly next level thinking and not solely christian in its logic, its common sense George. Doing unto others as we’d have them do to us is simple science Bud. So I ask you (as non rhetorically as possible) for any conceivable reason would you have wanted Trayvon Martin to shoot you in the heart?
Somehow, I think I already know the answer.
I’d like to share one more FB post with you that I put up after praying in church a few weeks ago, it came to me during The Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive Us Our Debts As We Forgive George Zimmerman…”
I forgive you Bud, now for the love of God Almighty go hug a black person.
Sincerely,
Tucker Dale Booth
