Crossposted in my blog at Immizen.com.
Over the summer I decided to give my daughter some writing assignments since she will need essay-writing-skills to apply to some of the better high schools in the area at the end of the year. I told her to write, once a week, an opinon piece about some current event. This is what she wrote for her first article (with revisions by me):
Zimmerman shouldn’t have been granted bail!
According to the New York Times, George Zimmerman was released from a Florida jail with a $1 million bail on Friday. Where did he get that money from!? Oh yes, of course, his stand-your-ground law supporters (a.k.a Republican types who are in love with guns and violence). They paid most of the bail. Mr. Zimmerman deserved to await his sentence in jail, but in America, some people defend the principle of gun ownership over the life of a boy, especially if that boy is black.
Perhaps nobody told those Zimmerman defenders how this all started? A 17-year-old African American teenager, Trayvon Martin, was walking from a convenience store with skittles in his pocket. The neighborhood patrol, Mr. George Zimmerman, got suspicious, called the police and started following the kid. The police told Zimmerman to stop pursuing the boy, but he did not listen and ended up shooting the kid. What was Trayvon Martin going to do with a bag of skittles?! We know that Trayvon wasn’t a model student, he was suspended from school for some shenanigans, but he didn’t deserve to die. People speculate that Trayvon was the one who assaulted Zimmerman, which is what provoked Zimmerman to shoot him. I think a lot of us, when seeing some random guy following us in a menacing manner, may do anything to protect ourselves. I would have probably beaten the crap out of that guy if he got too close. “Stranger danger” is what they tell children... but unfortunately, it did not save Trayvon.