I don't think we need to get our community all split up and fighting over one murder case, hundreds of people are murdered daily, this case just happened to get a lot of attention.
This is something I agree with tenfold - and I think many have lost sight of this.
This has become a manufactured controversy. Don't get me wrong, what happened that night was terrible and Trayvon Martin never deserved to die. But on the other hand, I am deeply disturbed by the double standard that everyone else just seems to want to leave as an elephant in the room and continue on with... what I can only call a charade of emotional masturbation in debating the "controversy" around this particular murder.
Eight black men have been murdered within a twenty mile radius of the area Trayvon Martin was killed since that night. Eight other people, killed by other people - but there are no headlines. There is no debate. There is no controversy.
And why? It's because those people were killed by other black men. In the eyes of society - in the eyes of the media; they don't matter. Those stories won't drive ratings. They won't inspire hundreds of thousands of twitter crusaders or reddit hotshots to jump on the bandwagon and send the story to the front page. All they get is a little blip on crimemapping.com.
But, ho - as soon as we have a white man who has killed a black man that we can point a finger at, release the wolves. Suddenly it's the topic of all the morning talk shows. News outlets are interviewing whoever they can get and filling whole hour long segments on their anecdotal bull shit. And everyone is just lapping it right up.
Once the verdict came down, all the news outlets started talking about rioting. Never mind the fact there were no riots happening, that most protests were completely peaceful and there was only one incident that could have been considered a riot - there are news stories to be made. I get the sense they wanted there to be riots, and they tried to stoke the fires as much as they can to milk the news story a little longer.
I don't know, I just thought more people would... realize that all this shit is a distraction. No progress has been made thanks to these "debates". In fact - it's taking it in the other direction. It's driving stakes between races, between people, between friends - and for what? It's completely counter-intuitive.
I hope I don't come off as too abrasive or that I was aiming this at any particular member or groups of members here. I'm talking about the internet/society as a whole. We need to have a serious shift in the way we deal with and discuss these issues if we want any progress to be made.