Putting Our Collective Foot Down..

When I attended a lecture by His Holiness The Dalai Lama in May, he emphasized the role of mothers in creating a better world. He said that mothers had a special responsibility to make their children feel loved. Boys, in particular, need this. As a mother of two boys, now men, I've thought about that counsel almost daily since then. Both of my guys turned out to be intelligent, responsible men. So I think I did an okay job. I respected and welcomed their opinions. I let them know their feelings mattered...that they mattered. Kids need to be treated with dignity and respect so that they in turn do that for others. They were my focus and it was my responsibility to make sure they understood how to navigate through life in a respectful and honest manner. This isn't to say that I was one of those mothers who related to my kids as a friend. I saw that happen in some families and it was a recipe for disaster. How do children learn to respect authority if their parents won't assume that role?

But none of this matters if some crazy person with a gun can come out and kill my boys whenever he feels like they're up to no good. Apparently our kids aren't safe anywhere - not in school, not at the mall, not walking home from the store. And yet, some of us go insane at the notion of not having access to military style assault weapons and extended clips. Why on earth would we set ourselves up for such disaster? Why on earth would we create laws that seem to go a little too far into personal choice when defining our right to defend ourselves from harm? Using a weapon to stop an attack is acceptable. Chasing someone down who did nothing to you and using the weapon when the person decides to defend himself against your actions defies all sensibility in the first place. To think a guy like that was found not guilty of such an act should scare the hell out of all of us.

There's a meanness out there now. Everything seems like an assault on one group or another. SCOTUS gave personhood to corporations, so the rest of us are inconsequential. They gutted the Voting Rights Act, just in case we didn't understand what they did to all of us with Citizen's United. How many ways can the highest court in the land tell the citizens of this country that they don't matter? Texas just made it more difficult for women to seek health care, particularly in the case of abortion, with another new bill introduced which prevents abortion after 6 weeks. For the love of God, we don't always know we're pregnant at 6 weeks. Why come after women this way? When we respond, and we will, you won't like it. I promise. 

Women want peace. We want calm. We want to go about our lives feeling safe and want everyone we love to feel the same way. We don't want to be disrespected - not by our partners, children, employers, friends, communities, governors, Congress.. We're tired of seeing news reports of our children being riddled with bullets at school. We're tired of our hearts breaking and knowing that doesn't matter so much anymore. 

Sybrina Fulton didn't want to be a role model for every mother out there who has lost a child to violence. She's far more noble than I would have been if one of my sons had been murdered. Particularly if the murderer got away with it as in the case of her son, Trayvon. 

My mother used to "put her foot down" about one thing or another, and I knew at that point that whatever I wanted was about to fly right out the window. That woman was so effective that although I entered college at 16, I continued to ask permission to do things until long after I moved out at 18. Maybe that's what all of us need to do. Maybe we need to put our "collective foot" down and say we've had enough. We've had enough of laws that protect the bad guys. Doesn't matter if it's a gangster or a bankster, we've had enough of other people destroying lives with impunity.

Who doesn't agree with that? Because the outrage is growing. 

There are no words adequate...

Oh my God. Where do I even start? First of all, I didn't watch this trial. Instead I read accounts. I couldn't watch because I had a bad feeling from the start about it. When I heard the judge had included manslaughter in the jury instructions, I knew then that this might not go well. 

George Zimmerman got away with murdering Trayvon Martin. The jurors were women. Were they mothers? This baby boy could have been anything he wanted to be. The defense attorneys made Trayvon appear as if he was the murderer. That somehow, he tried to kill Zimmerman with the sidewalk. The sidewalk was his weapon. How could they say this in front of Trayvon's parents? Did they really need to make that boy into a criminal when he wasn't? 

I read that a woman got twenty years for shooting a gun into the air to keep her abusive husband from attacking her. Same judge in both cases apparently. When a woman who is a victim of domestic violence can shoot a gun in the air - not even at her stupid husband - and then get twenty years for only trying to save her own life, and George Zimmerman can go free, who are we? 

Florida's stand your ground law is disgusting. This idiot stalked this child. He was told to stay in his vehicle. He ignored that because he was arrogant. He got out and killed Trayvon. He ended a life that had so much promise. He destroyed two parents who loved their boy more than life itself. Trayvon did nothing wrong. He was only walking home. He is not the guilty one here. Zimmerman is. Except that he's not. The jury has spoken. They returned a verdict of not guilty. So I guess it's still open season on our children, particularly if they have brown skin.

I read that the NRA is involved in the enactment of these stand your ground laws. Doesn't surprise me. Listening to Joy Reid on MSNBC, it appears that Florida may not repeal this law because everyone seems to like it. I hope she's wrong about that. I would hope that Floridians would reconsider and repeal it, because obviously, it's not so clear cut. Except the jurors evidently thought that it was. Some pundits are saying the the prosecution didn't prove their case. Maybe that's true. If so, shame on them. Did they even try? Sure seems like the consensus of opinion is that the prosecution didn't explain what happened well and really didn't rise to the occasion until their final summation. They failed Trayvon, his family, and the rest of us. Simple as that.

Why are we so afraid of enacting gun control laws? Doing so doesn't violate the 2nd amendment. Too many children have died in the last year alone. How can we continue to allow laws to exist that result in the murder of our children? Does only a guy with a gun have rights? Because that's what it looks like to me. And now Zimmerman can carry that gun around any time he wants. 

Stand your ground laws are too much of a free-for-all and are too subjective to exist. Zimmerman gets to go home tonight. Trayvon is dead. I don't know how anyone can feel good about this one. The system is broken. For Trayvon's parents, the pain will be never ending because this did NOT need to happen.