cold world

george zimmerman was found not guilty of murdering trayvon martin. the words seem insane as i type them out. i mean, frame it however you want to... but a bullet took trayvon martin's life. he was murdered by a gun, by george zimmerman's gun. the whole thing seems insane. if george zimmerman didn't murder trayvon martin, then how did trayvon martin die? the logic seems flawed at the most basic level.

and then i'm reminded that this is the cold world we live in. fairy tales are lies. bad stuff is happening all the time and life in general is not a fair game. me personally, i don't think it's fair that zimmerman gets to walk away from this. i don't think it's fair that a life was taken and no one's gonna pay any legal consequences for it whatsoever. but i also think life's not fair and i had sorta been preparing myself mentally for a george zimmerman acquittal.

justice isn't fair. the american justice system is probably one of the top justice systems in the world (this is an assumption on my part, i know nothing of the justice systems in other countries). when i take a look at our justice system from afar, i figure we could do a lot worse. sure there's room for improvement. it's not perfect. but it never will be. we'll always be victim to a system that usually favors the better lawyer. to a certain extent, it's like any other form of competition. if the lebron james of lawyers goes one on one with the brian scalabrene of lawyers (love ya red mamba), lebron's gonna dominate. that's a law of the cold world we live in.

and let's not forget the jury process. most people i know don't like jury duty, don't wanna be selected to be on a jury, are sometimes willing to lie or connive their way out of jury duty. we're told it's a civic duty but that concept doesn't resonate in any serious fashion with most people i know. it's like my good friend kevin said last night, "smart people don't get selected to juries." sure, there's probably random exceptions to that statement, but for the most part i assume most smart people are trying to outsmart their way out of being on a jury in the first place. what does that leave us with? i'll let you do the math. just another sad part of the cold world we live in.

but what's great about living in a cold world is that nobody's immune to it. we all have to deal with it. and so will george zimmerman. his life outside of prison will probably be better than a life inside prison or having to face the death penalty. but his life's gonna suck. george zimmerman will have to live the remainder of his life knowing that a large faction of the country he lives in despises him. he'll have to live with death threats and constant danger. he blamed gaining an excessive amount of weight on the anxiety of the past year or so. that's just the preface of the next chapter of his life. there won't be a free person in america that'll want to trade places with george zimmerman. everything george zimmerman does from now till eternity will be a suckier experience for him... anything ranging from facebook to grocery store shopping, hitting the beach to taking in a ballgame. zimmerman's free but he's not as free as the rest of us. he'll be imprisoned by a public that found him guilty a little over a year ago.

it's a cold world for all of us, but starting today, it'll be a little colder for george zimmerman.