Overcast again this Tuesday morning as if the season up here on California’s north coast, but again, too, a bit on the chilly side as we troll through the week watching the world crumble.

In the context of being updated, last night one of the jurors in the latest infamous trial told CNN’s Anderson Cooper: “I think George Zimmerman is a man whose heart was in the right place, but just got displaced by the vandalism in the neighborhoods, and wanting to catch these people so badly that he went above and beyond what he really should have done. But I think his heart was in the right place. It just went terribly wrong.”

(Illustration found here).

Ah, the old ‘heart in the right place’ concept of trying to re-imagine a shitty deed. Zimmerman carried a gun and was intent on busting somebody for the troubles in the apartment complex of his ‘patrol’ zone — the problem is he figured he was the law. Yet, he disobeyed the law.

Rem Rieder, who covers the media for USAToday, had a had a good post up Sunday about the profile of the Zimmerman/Martin case as it played out via news people.
All that bad journalism aside, this the bottom line:

This is hardly to suggest that Zimmerman is a candidate for canonization.
This is on him.
It was his reckless behavior that set this tragedy in motion.
If he had stayed in his vehicle as he was told to do by the police, Trayvon Martin would be alive today.

Yes, that’s the main scope of the whole matter — Zimmerman figured he was the law. And here was a guy who himself has had brushes with the law, and by all rights of humanity shouldn’t have been in possession of a firearm at all — period.
The big problem came when Trayvon Martin turned on his stalker, instead of running away, and nearly beat the shit out of Zimmerman, who was most-likely totally surprised and then used the gun.
Guns, boys, give ’em more guns.

Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic says the horror of this horror is in the fabric of America circa right now:

I don’t think the import of this is being appreciated.
Effectively, I can bait you into a fight and if I start losing I can can legally kill you, provided I “believe” myself to be subject to “great bodily harm.”
It is then the state’s job to prove — beyond a reasonable doubt — that I either did not actually fear for my life, or my fear was unreasonable.
In the case of George Zimmerman, even if the state proved that he baited an encounter (and I am not sure they did) they still must prove that he had no reasonable justification to fear for his life.
…
This was the job given to the state of Florida.
I have seen nothing within the actual case presented by the prosecution that would allow for a stable and unvacillating belief that George Zimmerman was guilty.
That conclusion should not offer you security or comfort.
It should not leave you secure in the wisdom of our laws.
On the contrary, it should greatly trouble you.
But if you are simply focusing on what happened in the court-room, then you have been head-faked by history and bought into a idea of fairness which can not possibly exist.
The injustice inherent in the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was not authored by a jury given a weak case.
The jury’s performance may be the least disturbing aspect of this entire affair.
The injustice was authored by a country which has taken as its policy, for the lionshare of its history, to erect a pariah class.
The killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman is not an error in programming.
It is the correct result of forces we set in motion years ago and have done very little to arrest.
…
When you have a society that takes at its founding the hatred and degradation of a people, when that society inscribes that degradation in its most hallowed document, and continues to inscribe hatred in its laws and policies, it is fantastic to believe that its citizens will derive no ill messaging.
It is painful to say this: Trayvon Martin is not a miscarriage of American justice, but American justice itself.
This is not our system malfunctioning.
It is our system working as intended.
To expect our juries, our schools, our police to single-handedly correct for this, is to look at the final play in the final minute of the final quarter and wonder why we couldn’t come back from twenty-four down.

And that most-likely is why at its core, America is in a way-bad shape — zim nuts aside.