So Centaur sent a Tweet to Robert Zimmerman, who is apparently making decent use of his 15 minutes of fame (don’t worry, no hashtags were used since they are for mongrel idiots) courtesy of his brother having killed Trayvon Martin. I couldn’t agree more with the content of the message but since Tweets are so short I wanted to go over what it’s all about, especially since a few folks have re-Tweeted it. Centaur and I share the same mind on this issue, even if we diverge at gun bans – my views on a gun ban would probably be grouped into the “conservative” column.
Apparently, this media mastermind posted a picture of Martin giving the middle finger (obtained from the kid’s Facebook or something) next to a picture of the kid who killed a 13 month-old baby in Georgia, who was also giving the middle finger. The pictures were accompanied by, “A picture speaks a thousand words. Any questions?” Well, actually, I have a lot of questions but I skimmed through this guy’s Twitter profile and he seems a little confrontational to anyone not friendly to his stance, so I get the sense that asking a followup to the middle finger pics would not answer anything for me. In summation: while taking a picture of yourself giving the middle finger and posting it online is juvenile, it certainly isn’t enough evidence for someone to derive a full profile of your personality or to intimate that it proves your guilt in a crime. If Zimmerman had posted a picture of Trayvon Martin at a Nickelback concert, on the other hand, that is proof-positive of guilt.
Anyway, that’s not the issue here. Zimmerman followed his picture up with another Tweet concerning the events in Georgia:
Lib media shld ask if what these2 black teens did 2 a woman&baby is the reason ppl think blacks mightB risky.
I’ll do my best to try to decode this from Douchebag: “The liberal media should ask if what these two black teens did to a woman and her baby is the reason people think blacks might be risky.” Let’s look over the fact that typing like that is an offense as serious as being a Nickelback fan, and focus on the actual message here. Robert Zimmerman is telling us that because the person/people who committed a heinous act are black that The New York Times should run a front page headline about whether blacks might be perceived as risky by the general populace. I’m assuming that, “ppl,” or, “people,” in his Tweet is meant to convey society as a whole. I almost checked the ‘Comedy’ checkbox for Category of this rant as a result of that. I mean, the implication is absolutely preposterous to the minds of pretty much every thinking person since you can change out “black” for “asian” or “white” or anything else, leaving you with an equally hilarious misstatement. There’s really only one instance where that statement isn’t absurd, but we’ll get to that in a few paragraphs.
As one could expect, Zimmerman was called out for saying that. He even got to appear on that fuckwad Piers Morgan’s show. I didn’t see that clip but I’m going to assume Morgan pretty much spent the entire time talking over him. Now, he had a choice at this point: he could have owned up to what he said and apologized, or he could have backpedaled and tried to “explain” what he meant. What did he do?
I realize those were controversial and offensive and I did publicly apologize for them. I’m a human being. I’m being upfront about what I did. I made a mistake. We’ve been led to believe that it’s a junior-high-school-aged person because of the pictures. The analogy is these are two people who chose to represent themselves in this way. One was accused of killing a baby, and whatever’s in his social media makes the rounds immediately. However, the other person who almost killed my brother had he disarmed him — my brother had every indication to believe he would have killed him — his social media is off limits.
Nice combo, Rob! “I made a mistake. Now let me tell you what I really meant…” (Obviously, he didn’t say all of that in a row, I just combined them all into one block for ease of reading.) Hats off to your attempt at bringing the conversation back to the middle finger pictures. For the record, Zimmerman’s point about Martin’s social media being off limits is actually valid, even though nobody believes his brother seriously thought his life was in danger. That’s what makes this situation so masterful. Anyway, Centaur’s Tweet read:
Your remarks were not a mistake: Why apologize? Never issue an apology for something you feel strongly about.
Why do we feel like his remarks were not a mistake? Let’s go back a few paragraphs: There’s really only one instance where that statement isn’t absurd, but we’ll get to that in a few paragraphs. At no point in my life have I ever made the “mistake” of saying something even remotely like what Zimmerman said. None of my friends have done it. Not even when drunk (and anyway, drunken words are sober thoughts). What Robert is saying is that his brother was justified in being suspicious of Martin, even though it’s established that the kid was not doing anything wrong. As I stated in my original discourse on this matter, I suspected George Zimmerman – while maybe not a racist – certainly profiled Trayvon Martin as a result of his skin color. I still don’t know if I think George is a racist but it’s pretty clear that his brother is. Racists think and say things like what Robert Zimmerman said, and then when they get called out on it by the rest of society they try to pass it off as, “Oh, I was just so heated about this issue and I said things I shouldn’t have.” Obviously, he was trying to defend his brother – which would rile anyone up – but he could have done that in any number of other ways without making a parallel between Trayvon Martin – a young man who was doing nothing wrong, just in the wrong place at the wrong time and unfortunate events resulted – and De’Marquise Elkins – a young man who shot and killed a 13 month-old child.
Conservatives like to come to someone’s defense any time someone perceived as liberal calls someone a racist, because they feel it’s overused or misapplied. I can understand that sentiment – shit, I think people get labeled anti-Semitic too easily when they are just being general assholes – but you can’t look at this situation with an objective eye and conclude that Robert Zimmerman’s mistake was his choice of words: His mistake was putting them out there for the public to see.