Is killing ever justifiable? Are all lives equal? When exactly is it ‘Okay’ to kill someone?
There is no correct answer. Beliefs, ethics, and morals vary from person to person.
I hope all people understand all life is precious and significant, even if the life is a spider.
Killing for domination, and ultimately for survival, is partly the reason why we are so successful as a species.
Killing each other is part of the Human experience and history has shown that mankind always had a fascination with it.
Violence leads to violence. Unimpeded, it does not resolve. The success of the Human species has been the ability to create. The ability to kill may yet destroy them.
Violence does not solve problems, it creates them.
Sunday evening, February 26th, 2012: It was raining in Central Florida while the NBA All-Stars game and the Oscars were about to begin on TV.
A 17-year-old high school junior from Miami Gardens serving a 10-day suspension went to 7-Eleven to get candy.
It was the third time Trayvon Martin was disciplined at school, so this time his parents sent him up to a quiet, racially mixed, gated community in Sanford with his dad to get his priorities straight.
He was black and wore a hoodie.
George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old neighborhood watch volunteer who routinely called police to report anything awry, had just made dinner and told his family he was headed to Target.
He was Hispanic and wore a holstered Kel Tek 9mm semiautomatic handgun.
The brief encounter between the two at the Retreat at Twin Lakes would leave one dead and the other in hiding, give rise to a social movement and, at least temporarily, cost the local police chief his job.
In the next 30 days, the name ‘Trayvon’ would be tweeted more than 2 million times.
In a fast-paced world of 24-hour cable news and nonstop social media, what happened that night has become both common knowledge and a blur of unattributed rumor accepted as fact.
A controversial police report incited conspiracy theories and failed to definitively resolve what everyone wants to know:
Who picked the fight? Armchair crime scene investigators around the nation insist on access to the evidence.
And millions more demand an arrest in a case now being looked at by at least three agencies, including the FBI.
The protagonists in the saga gripping the nation are Zimmerman, a man with a history of going after suspects in hot pursuit, and Trayvon, a chronically tardy teenager.
Trayvon liked aviation, was making plans for college and got suspended for having a small empty plastic bag containing marijuana residue.
Their story begins when Zimmerman got out of his vehicle and pursued Trayvon on foot.
But in the tale pieced together from 911 calls, witnesses, police, Zimmerman’s family and the girl who was on the phone with Trayvon in the last minutes of his life.
A key one-minute gap remains a mystery that may never be solved: Who approached whom? Who threw the first blow?
And the key question a special prosecutor in Jacksonville is now tasked to investigate: Did Zimmerman justifiably take Trayvon’s life to save his own?