Actually, I find this meme mildly offensive. I don't need to project into the future what Trayvon may have become in order to believe that Zimmerman was legally justified in shooting him on 2/26/12.
I don't know if I'm unique in this regard or not, but I had a fairly troubled youth. While violence was never something I sought out, or even engaged in at all for that matter, I smoked pot (and beyond), I grew a plant or two in my day, I had an interest in guns (since well before I was 17), I talked the slang of the day (incessantly), I dropped out of high school and joined the Army at 17, I hung around outlaw bikers after I got home, built choppers, loved when pictures of our builds made us all look "hard" even when it was never true (for me anyway).
I ended up putting my self-destructive and thrill-seeking energies into jobs that paid well but still gave me that adrenaline rush. The rush from doin' dope didn't compare with walking beams 400' off the ground. Learning how to weld gave me productive opportunities that provided similar rushes as splittin' traffic at 70 or 80 mph down the 405 Freeway at "rush" hour, and wore me out to the point that I just quit doin' that kind of stuff on my time off. When my dog gets real rowdy in the house, I take him outside and run the excess energy out of him with a Frisbee. He comes back in and sleeps like a baby for the rest of the day and night. I did the same thing with myself as a young man. Trayvon had every potential to learn how to control his excesses too. It just didn't work out that way, but I'm not going to engage in rank stereotyping just because he hadn't learned those lessons by the time he turned 17.
Personally, I have no problem envisioning Trayvon going through much of what I did, getting over sewing his wild oats and settling down to maybe even become a championship UFC fighter. Anyone who even casually follows that sport knows that many fighters have much worse backgrounds than Trayvon did by the time they were 17 and started getting into MMA, which apparently, Trayvon had started getting into. Many of those fighters credit the sport with saving their lives. Trayvon wasn't anywhere near being on an irreversible track, even compared to my own white-bread upbringing.
He made a fatal mistake that night, but his life and the potential he had for a decent future doesn't need to be defined by only that mistake. When you boil it all down, he was still just a 17 year old kid. I'd say judge his potential future either on what we all experienced as youngins' and where we went from there, or on what screw-ups your own kids have engaged in on their way to becoming "good people" and productive, law-abiding adults.
Sorry if this seems like a rant. I don't intend it that way. It just kind of gets to me that the death of a 17 year old kid is nearly celebrated based on such lightweight evidence as a few pictures on a cell phone and one fight that he lost with a bullet to the heart.
Blues
