Storms and (Buried) Warnings in the Age of Travyon Martin and George Zimmerman by Ed Pavlić

Storms and (Buried) Warnings in the Age of Travyon Martin and George Zimmerman  by Ed Pavlić | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
You see that woman that walks the streets,You see that policeman out on his beat, But, when the Lord gets ready, you gotta move. —Fred McDowell & Rev. Gary Davis
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Trayvon remains underground, to my knowledge he hasn't arisen. No Ascension nor Assumption. He'll never be a free man, again. It’s true and it’s a crime.
Last week in Douala, Cameroon, on the other hand, a crowd spent four hours lynching a suspected criminal, waking him up, and apparently lynching him all over again. Da Capo. CNN International noted that such lynchings are a common occurrence in Cameroon. Well, as a well known 20th century bard from Baltimore sang, famously, “God Bless the Child”. . . who makes it through the Southern trees of Cameroon. Or, Florida. Or Chicago on the 4th of July. Or, or. 
Also, last week, at about 9:30 pm on Monday July 8th, on my block of Havyar Sokak in Cihangir, Istanbul, while gas-masked protesters ran for cover, doused their faces and rinsed their mouths in milk and rubbed their eyes with Tums tablets, and while I slammed my windows shut to close off billows of tear gas from the latest round in the Istanbul Police force's war against sidewalk cafés and green spaces, I noticed the delivery guy from MissPizza, located just across the narrow street, exit into the fray, calmly place three Miss Pizzas in the orange box on the back of his Vespa, pull his red handkerchief up over his nose, and buzz off up the wrong way of the one-way cobThe collision of these images got me thinking about risk, proportion, freedom and its ever-shiftily situated situations.   
Meantime, George Zimmerman, having, we're told, benefitted (again!) from his "white privilege" in the "not guilty" verdict, and reported upon by a multicultural, medial array of reporters, one can only guess, all checking their own Privilege-Meter apps on iPhones (have you seen that app?) as soon as cameras are diverted, realizes that, you know what, he "may never be a free man, again." In tag lines on CNN, France 24, BBC, Bloomberg, and Al Jazzera among other networks, no doubt, we’re told over and over, "His life may never be the same, again." 
Ok. And, that's a bad thing?
It must be the fixation with the new app on the iPhone. If not, how explain that no one seems to remark that the reason George Zimmerman (cue Star Wars soundtrack) "may never be a free man, again" might just be because: one, his previous idea of freedom seemed to be spending his waking hours armed, patrolling a gated community looking for the next shadowy threat to his freedom, or his property; and, two, that having come face to the face with the grim, in fact murderous, existential results of a gated "freedom" based upon so-called "white privilege," Mssr. Zimmerman still refuses to face the seemingly inescapable conclusion that, by whatever tricknosis, he'd been hoodwinked into calling his (I'm guessing unpaid?) prison-guard lifestyle freedom for many years.
James Baldwin used to annoy people by saying, simply, "If you keep me in jail, there's got to be someone to watch me. Now there are two prisoners." 
Have none of these, we'd assume, well-educated reporters and commentators entertained the simple question: why was a man who'll never be free, again, compelled to patrol his neighborhood with a gun when he was free? And, so the more thorny question--one we won't pursue here—if Trayvon wasn't free, why does it seem he was so comparatively non-plussed about the Orange Alert in the neighborhood (if not in the world) on that night a year and a half ago? 
In “Jailhouse Blues,” a long time ago, Bessie Smith observed that the problem with jail is you got to stay so long. Even after all your friends have got up and gone. It’s worth thinking about.
But, in fact, Zimmerman’s right, and so are the reporters--at least according to what their agents claim, at every chime in the 14 second news cycle, on Twitter--George Zimmerman's life IS in danger. So is everyone else's, not the least of whom those people so obsessed with their safety, and the ever-multiplying, ever-lurking threats to it, that they refuse to actually live in their towns, in their cities, which is somewhat too neatly to say in their own lives, at all. Or, at least to the extent that they can avoid—which is exactly to say afford—it.
In this, in fact, strangely, Zimmerman's hope is everyone's—or at least many many many people's—hope made painfully, almost appallingly, vivid. It's to turn tide, face the insidious (or glaringly obvious, depending upon one's point of view) design of his former imprisonment on the wrong-side of the gates in the world of gated communities, neighborhood watch, homeland security, etc., etc., ad nauseum, in fact, ad mortem. From that turning, with as much guts and aplomb as it takes to deliver a Miss Pizza in Istanbul, or to buy Skittles in Florida, or to drive a car (to work, at night!) as a black man, the kind of guts it takes for a seven year old to play in Nat Cole Park (Chicago) on his nation’s birthday, he'll encounter his former exile for what it was and from that point of view, just possibly, he'd assent to life among human beings (yes, with its attendant risks).
From there, amid rhythms of a life actually lived in the world, he’d realize that, turns out, in most cases, the world isn't a murderous plot against one's safety. In relation to that rhythm, he might encounter the glimmer in the functioning psyche that indicates the extent to which, however, the contemporary world does seem—especially to the extent one's tuned into the media outlets, including and especially the so-called social ones—an almost constant assault on one's sanity. The battle against that assault isn’t waged with fire arms, it’s not even usually a battle at all; it involves life lived in communication with people, and with people whose points of view, whose experiences, are different from one’s own.
In the United States, that’s all we’ve got. We don’t have villages, per se; if we retreat, we retreat to bunkers, often ones falling down around abandoned factories. As Baldwin wrote, Americans’ “history is each other.” And, the truth is that privilege doesn’t bear upon access to that; in my experience, far as I’ve been able to tell, privilege bears an inverse relationship to that, based as privilege seems to be on geographies charted, and gated, by zip codes and test scores and demographic pedigree.
Zimmerman could, then, say, join in cooperation with those fighting the absurd, wild West-inspired, (and so inescapably white supremacist) "stand your ground" legislation and begin to chip away at the murderous, paranoid concoction that had, by degrees, one guesses, throughout his lifetime, replaced his personality and preempted his historical and social sensibility. He could, therefore, begin to assess the route that had delivered him to such a awful place (it’s egregious to call it free, it’s almost criminal to think of it as privileged), carrying a loaded weapon, stalking shadows and, finally, a teenager armed with Skittles, ice tea and, you think?, an attitude. 
From that point of view, a seemingly deeply un-American realization arcs to well within one’s grasp: the idea of privilege (who's got it, who wants it, how much, etc.) itself is incompatible with freedom which simply doesn’t exist, can not be practically experienced, understood, or communicated in the “I got mine, you got yours to get,” terms of our contemporary public and, even, intellectual discourses. 
Now. Such a turn of tide as I describe above and the accompanying existentially-engaged rationality it makes possible won't make George Zimmerman safe. But, it might make him a person, no mean feat. By that route, no matter who says what, and only by that route, he’d be freer than any access, no matter how fluid, to any privilege, no matter how vaunted with shiny trinkets, could make him. And, the threats to his life, then, would come from exactly those NRA-lobby types that likely informed and instructed him en route to his previous (or current) mentality, are supporting him now and who almost certainly financed his defense. Circular, this. And, strange as it sounds, if he'd just admit his racism and realize the trick bag he's in, has been in, many, I'd say most, of the people protesting the decision in his case would join him in rational, political, historically resonant, organized work against the insane prevalence of guns (and the will to use them) and gates (and our compulsive need to build them) in our streets, in our homes, and in our minds. 
Yes, it's terrible. Trayvon Martin is going to stay dead. And, George Zimmerman will never be a free man again. And, if you can't pierce the fatally circular (il)logic in the story about this situation as told in the media, neither will you. But, I take it, that's ok. Because if you've come this far just following along, you probably aren't much freer now than George Zimmerman was two years ago hiding out nights in the bushes (that decorated the iron fencing) around his neighborhood. Which, unless you're sick about the murder, about all the murders, the verdict, and the disastrous pageant it's provoked in the media, truth be told, is likely just the way you want it. If you follow the media version of reality, you’d never suspect there was another way to have it.
But, why not, right? You can always order out. Let the cat on the Vespa, the taxi drivers, and the public school kids bear the risks. But beware, the un-freedoms you are told diminish as your privilege meter reaches the red zone activating your open door to the dreamland. . . well, you just might be holding the device upside down. 
When you're standing at whatever version of shutters you've chosen, shutters that close you in at least as well as they close anything out, it might be good to think about the warning part in the title of the early poem, "Storm Warnings," by the poet, Adrienne Rich, another 20th (and 21st) century bard from Baltimore, when she concludes: 
            This is our sole defense against the season;             These are the things we have learned to do             Who live in troubled regions.
By exactly the (buried?) logic of the case and life (so-called) of George Zimmerman, a storm warning if ever there was one, a storm the warning in which is being woefully, and one guesses willfully, overlooked, we’d better learn to do something else. 
Ed Pavlic, Istanbul, July 16, 2013
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Ed Pavlić’s  most recent books are Visiting Hours at the Color Line (National Poetry Series, Milkweed Editions, 2013), But Here Are Small Clear Refractions (Achebe Center, 2009),Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (UGA P, 2008) and Labors Lost Left Unfinished (UPNE, 2006). His other books are Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue(Copper Canyon P, 2001) and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture (U Minn P, 2002). His prizes include the National Poetry Series Open Competition, the Darwin Turner Memorial Award from African American Review, The American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize, and the Author of the Year Award from The Georgia Writers Association. He has had fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center, The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, The MacDowell Colony, and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University.