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A Darwinian Reversal, or; “How He Gonna Get His Money?”
Aristotle believed that there were two basic types of virtue: intellectual virtue, which is taught, and moral virtue, which is the result of habit. “By being compelled to acquire good habits,” Bertrand Russell synopsized, “we shall in time, Aristotle thinks, come to find pleasure in performing good actions.” These are surely worthy positions to consider and debate, but the intrinsic connection of virtue with goodness was accepted as foundational.
Some 2,338 years after Aristotle’s death, however, virtue has been redefined by one Nautika Harris who explained the nobility of her cousin, Trevon Johnson, and his recent robbery of another person’s home as follows: “You have to understand, how he gonna get his money to have clothes to go to school?”
Never mind the process by which virtuous thoughts and actions are inculcated in the mind and heart. Never mind Aristotle’s further proposition that virtue is found in the “golden mean,” between two extremes, i.e., the virtue of courage residing somewhere between recklessness and cowardice, or the virtue of a ready wit being located somewhere between buffoonery and boorishness. No: Virtue is now reduced to breaking into another person’s home and taking their property because, otherwise, how you gonna get your money?
Under the circumstances, it’s tempting to reverse the Darwinian model and observe that instead of ascending from the lower animals, people are rapidly descending toward them. Meanwhile, Johnson’s exercise of this new virtue ended in his own death, as the lady whose home he was robbing shot and killed him in the act. He was 17 years old. “I don’t care if she have her gun license or any of that,” said Harris of the homeowner, “that is way beyond the law, way beyond.”
It’s embarrassing to have to explain this to Ms. Harris, and it ought to embarrass you to have to be instructed in such elementary distinctions, but while we mourn the loss of your cousin, it isn’t “way beyond the law,” for free people to defend their lives and property. The idea that anyone, anywhere, should surrender their home, their belongings, and their safety so that aggressors and thieves can invade and plunder is so breathtakingly ignorant that one can only marvel at the stunted mind and spirit capable of framing the words, “How he gonna get his money?” If it was “his money,” he wouldn’t have needed to break into another person’s home to get it, would he?
The larger question confronting those with a moral sense beyond that of the average two-year old who grabs another child’s pacifier, is how to address the rapid disintegration of civil society and its accompanying barbarism. In November 2014, the state of California formalized a novel approach, with Proposition 47, which reduced the number of felonies (and felons in prison) by — are you ready? — reclassifying some felony offenses as misdemeanors and springing former felons from the pokey.
Who knew it could be that easy? Why not outlaw Cs, Ds, and Fs in school while we’re at it, so that everyone is an A or B student? Why, we could reduce the prison population further still if we eliminated murder charges on the grounds that the deceased isn’t really dead — he’s just in a state of decompositional relaxation. Sentence? Forty-five days without video games, to include time served waiting for trial, followed by hot chocolate and sugary doughnuts with the parole officer once every six months if your social schedule will allow and thanks for shopping!
Meanwhile, California Dreamin’ has turned into a nightmare, as Marc Debbaudt explains in the San Francisco Chronicle, where that city has achieved the dubious honor of having the highest increase in property crimes in the United States. Car looting has increased some 31 percent since 2014, and has nearly tripled since 2010. Violent crimes are on the rise, with 48 cities in the California experiencing increases in their violent crime rates (34 of those cities seeing double-digit increases).
A 2015 article in the Los Angeles Times reported that the framers of Proposition 47 anticipated that “A drop in the state prison population because of Proposition 47 is expected to save about $100 million annually, according to a state estimate… [that] will go toward treatment and education programs beginning in late 2016.”
The results thus far? In San Francisco alone, the crime wave that Prop 47 sparked resulted in a $120 million loss in the first six months of 2015. In Los Angeles, the cost of increased crime over the same time frame was over $250 million. To recap, California’s paradigm-busting Coddle-and-Release Program, which was suppose to save taxpayers $100 million annually, has actually cost them over $370 million in just six months, and that’s just in two cities! What about the resident of the other 46 cities whose crime rate is on the rise, whose property is being looted and whose lives are at risk? Where do they go for answers?
Well, if they listened to a recent debate between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, they heard a question on the “mass incarceration” of African Americans that was prefaced with the following statement from a member or the panel: “As a black man in America, if I were born today I’d have a one in three chance of ending up in prison in my life.” A sane candidate would have immediately responded by asking how the gentleman how he hadn’t ended up in prison and gone on to suggest that the best way to avoid prison is to refrain from criminal acts. Instead, both candidates responded by promising to end “mass incarceration,” as if the authorities were going about rounding up entire black communities for an all-expense paid trip to Treblinka.
When we turn Martin Luther King’s dream around and disfigure it to the point that we focus not on the content of a person’s character, but the skin color of the perp, we’ve done more than just lose our footing on the slippery slope to cultural delinquency. We’ve discarded our dignity and performed great swan dive into the abyss.
A healthy society would measure justice not by the number of people incarcerated, nor even by their race, but by whether law abiding citizens could go out to dinner without being assaulted and mugged. Or, perhaps, by whether their home is being looted by a pack of imbeciles, all because some starry-eyed liberal decided to assuage his sense of self-loathing by letting criminals loose to prey on those who work hard and play by the rules.
A healthy society would equip young Trevon Johnson with the mental, cultural, and spiritual ability to draw upon the accumulated wisdom of human experience so he could get his money by earning it in exchange for contributing his unique talents and gifts to a community that fosters growth rather than victimhood and depraved entitlement.
A healthy society would — above all else — be honest with itself and dispense with pretentious, therapeutic pablum that absolves the miscreant of responsibility for his actions. After all, as Dostoyevsky reminded us a century and a half ago:
Published in Culture, Domestic PolicyA man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying to others and to yourself.
Kate,
I would bet you dollars to donuts (please no cream filled) that Trayvon (I’ve been spelling it wrong all along) knew who Zimmerman was. Trayvon’s self-described girlfriend knew exactly who Zimmerman was and used the “little cracker” term to refer to him. Believe me, Trayvon was not afraid of Zimmerman and, in fact, held him in contempt. He was going to ground and pound Zimmerman doing serious if not lethal damage to him. Both Trayvon and his friend hated Zimmerman precisely because he was interfering with the robberies. We don’t know whether either one was participating but they identified with the robbers. “How he gonna get his money?” That little cracker was preventing somebody from “getting his money”.
Kate, this was not on a major metropolitan subway. It was not a “crime-ridden neighbourhood” but a lower middle-class suburban community that had been relatively safe until the burglaries start to increase exponentially. Trayvon is a young black male wearing a hoody hanging around a few houses that aren’t his or one of his friends in the rain. Travon may have just gotten high and was out on a lark. Or maybe he was part of the “[REDACTED]s” and was casing a house. Zimmerman drives up parks his car and gets out. Why should Trayvon take off running if he didn’t know who Zimmerman was. He wasn’t being followed at that point. There was nothing creepy or strange or threatening about Zimmerman. Kate, you are projecting the feelings of a woman alone on a subway who is being followed by a middle-aged man seemingly for no reason, onto a 6’1″ young male who is in very good physical condition who sees a smallish 30-year-old man drive up in a middle-class car dressed in a middle-class way and get out. This is a residential neighborhood. Zimmerman is nothing out of the ordinary. His behaviour isn’t threatening unless you already know he’s the neighborhood watch and he’s watching you and you’re angry about that.
Regards,
Jim
Not to re-litigate the whole Zimmerman thing, but I don’t believe this is true. As I recall the sequence of events, he was already out of his car, talking to dispatch on his cell phone. The dispatcher asked him if he was following, he said yes, and they told him “we don’t need you to do that”. It was as Zimmerman was returning to his car that Martin jumped him.
Jim, this is a complicated story. As such, it makes a bad case-study for either the #BLM folks or those who identify with people who are fed up with political correctness, attacks on the 2nd Amendment, and excuses for the bad behavior of young men, especially young black men.
Had Trayvon’s case not been taken up by #BLM—who lump it in with the deaths of Michael Brown as a problem of police profiling even though Zimmerman was not a police officer, and of white racism even though Zimmerman is hispanic— it would have been adjudicated properly. Zimmerman might have been charged with manslaughter and acquitted, perhaps with a sobering community-wide conversation about what, exactly, neighborhood watch groups should be doing to protect themselves. This would have been a much healthier way of extracting useful wisdom from an indisputably painful event.
When arguing with people about police profiling/racism/Ferguson etc., I counter any reference to Trayvon with “George Zimmerman was not a police officer, and therefore Trayvon’s death is not relevant.”
Kate,
I agree that the BLM lunatics want to exploit every possible thing even though 95% of black violent deaths are black on black crime with illegal weapons. I just refuse to give up on this one for the very reason that Zimmerman wasn’t a police officer. Apparently, there are no communities anymore. So community watch is OK as long as nothing ever happens. The eight documented burglaries that Zimmerman & friend prevented count for nothing.
Sure you can have a neighborhood watch and sure you can get a carry permit. Just don’t expect to ever do anything with either one. If you do the left lunatics plus the lame stream media will destroy your life one way or another. For this, the left wing President of the United States turned Zimmerman into a political football and booted him right through the goal posts for 3 points. I’m sure so many people have bought the phony Trayvon plea. Something must have been wrong with Zimmerman because we didn’t feel good about the outcome. Zimmerman’s lawyer spent 3.5 hours in summation going over every fact and detail with the jury. The jury asked and got the judge to review the law a second time for them. Not good enough!
How we feel has become reality and the facts & law are just window dressing. No wonder this country is in the trouble it’s in.
Regards,
Jim
MWM,
I saw a video of Zimmerman himself going through all of the events at the actual site in which they took place. According to Zimmerman, Trayvon took off as soon as he got out of his car. He followed Trayvon around a corner. When he made it to the other side which was reasonably wide open going forward, Trayvon had disappeared from view. He called it in that he had lost him. He turned and started back towards his car. Trayvon had been hiding behind some bushes at the corner of the house. Trayvon came out and hit him knocking him down.
The “we don’t need you to do that” was not a command but a reminder to Zimmerman that he wasn’t a police officer and, therefore, wasn’t required to put himself in harms way. They were afraid for Zimmerman’s safety and rightly so.
Regards,
Jim
None of which contradicts the fact that it is *not* true that “he got out of the car after being told not to”.
Uh, call the neighborhood watch?
Exactly. And we shouldn’t have felt good about it. It wasn’t good. Trayvon might have been an idiot, but he was a seventeen year old idiot. Zimmerman might have been attempting heroism, but he ended up shooting a kid. The whole thing was crummy…and then the grandstanders got their mitts on it, and made it worse.
This is what justice is. The justice the mobs call for is something else entirely.
He was not being told not to do it. The statement by the dispatcher was a reminder that he wasn’t required to follow Trayvon. The reason was risk to Zimmerman not that Zimmerman was doing anything wrong. He was appraising them of his every action. If they objected to anything he was doing they would have told him so immediately.
There is very strong need here to find fault with Zimmerman. Part of it seems to be coming from where you would expect. People who are being taken in by the false portrayal of Trayvon. However, there is something else. There is the usual professional disdain for those that are not professionals. Zimmerman as a trained compliant neighborhood watcher is still not a professional police officer. In a society that has rejected freedom & initiative and wants to give all power to the “experts”, the non-professional has a hard time. Yet, the very same arguments that can be employed against the neighborhood watch guy can be employed against any legal gun owner.
Who are you to own a handgun? You aren’t a professional.
Regards,
Jim
Jim, I’m going by the outcome, which was tragic for everyone involved. There’s a reason it is preferable, where possible, to have criminal behavior or potential criminal behavior addressed by people who have the training and authority to handle it.
Zimmmerman had a gun, yes, but he didn’t have pepper spray, an Asp, body armor. He didn’t have a badge that made it obvious he had the right to be following Trayvon. Whatever his training was, it was clearly inadequate to the occasion—if Trayvon had a gun, Zimmerman could easily have been killed. And Trayvon’s excuse would have been plausible—“this gay cracker was stalking me and I was standing my ground.”
Again, I’m not condemning Zimmerman. I tend to look kindly on persons who are willing to step up and take responsibility for the safety of their neighborhoods. In a less politically-polarized world, the lessons drawn from this event might actually have been useful—maybe better training or I.D. for Neighborhood Watch people, maybe some heightened awareness of the unnecessary belligerence of teenaged boys… as it is, no useful lesson will be drawn because Trayvon is a saint/monster and Zimmerman is a saint/monster.
Kate,
I’m not buying. There is freedom from bad outcomes in a perfect world but nowhere else. The reason for the neighborhood watch was the cops didn’t have the manpower to devote to this lower middle-class neighborhood. The time from when they got the call till when they got there was way too long. They didn’t follow up well and they weren’t catching the burglars. George Zimmerman worked for a living he wasn’t being paid to be a neighborhood watchman. He needed to make enough to pay for his mortgage, his car, his insurance, and his taxes. You remember Kate, George was a real citizen. He even had a baby at home who he needed to buy the diapers for. Sorry, he wasn’t up to your standards. I’m sure the eight people whose homes weren’t broken into because of George were very happy about it but what do they know?
I think we just don’t care about the ordinary person anymore. Why don’t we all just admit it.
Regards,
Jim
I feel fine about the outcome.
It’s not that he wasn’t up to my standards. It’s that the outcome sucked, for everyone involved. I doubt sincerely that Zimmerman expected to be attacked, or to shoot a 17 year old dead… not to mention all the awful sequelae.
If someone isn’t being actively attacked, I’ll maintain that it’s preferable to leave it to the police, for all the reasons already enumerated. This has nothing to do with self-defense in extremis—which, once Trayvon jumped him (assuming Zimmerman was telling the truth, which I’m willing to do) is where Zimmerman found himself. It has to do with how to avoid getting into that situation to begin with.
Incidentally, I know this was made into an anti-gun story. And it may be that Zimmerman would not have followed Trayvon if he hadn’t had a gun on him. On the other hand, he might not have survived the encounter had he not had a gun on him.
Yeah, but Zimmerman probably doesn’t. And I can’t be sanguine about the death of a seventeen year old. The seventeen year old doesn’t have to be a perfect human being in order for his life to have value. Whatever it was he was planning to do that night (go home to his dad’s house and watch TV? Rob a few neighbors en route?) he didn’t deserve to die, and Zimmerman didn’t deserve to have to carry that weight around with him for the rest of his life—which is hard enough even when you aren’t also subject to the sort of media attention that Zimmerman received.
As a general rule, a use of force incident comes after a whole bunch of failures. It can be proximate failures (bad tactics, stupid choices) or it can be ultimate failures (lousy families, bad policing). Often, the failures are not those of the parties directly involved (think Trayvon’s parents, or teachers, or the police or whatever). Once you’re in the moment—Zimmerman and Trayvon, duking it out—the choices become severely limited, but prior to that moment, it is nearly always possible to identify, at least in retrospect, moments when a different outcome could have been provided for. The retrospective analysis—the operational critique—is important because it helps to identify those moments and (at least potentially) prevent another tragedy. That —the operational critique—is what gets forestalled or abandoned when external forces (#BLM, the President?!) decide to make use of an event for their own purposes. That’s too bad. We could have learned something from the Martin/Zimmerman encounter. Instead, we all told our stories.