RS McCain Has The Final Word On the "Racial Angle" In the Zimmerman Case

They're not rioting in Florida (that I know of) in the wake of the Zimmerman "not guilty" verdict, but there's already been marching and rioting in the most politically left-wing major city in the United States, Oakland, CA. 

Hundreds of demonstrators marched in San Francisco and Oakland on Sunday to express outrage over a Florida jury's acquittal ofGeorge Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who had been accused of second-degree murder for fatally shooting unarmed African American teenager Trayvon Martin. 

Joining groups in Los Angeles, New York and other cities around the country, the protesters chanted, "Shut the system down," and held signs reading "Justice for Trayvon Martin" and "Zimmerman: the people say guilty." 

Many said Saturday's acquittal of Zimmerman - whose attorneys argued that he had acted in self-defense when he killed 17-year-old Martin after pursuing him - laid bare a persistent racism in American society, in the criminal justice system and particularly in Florida's "stand your ground" self-defense law. 

"We're both new parents, and we can't believe we live in a country where a man can follow and shoot a 17-year-old boy and face no consequences," said Hillary Ronen, a 37-year-old legislative aide from San Francisco who went downtown with her husband and 8-month-old daughter. "We're outraged and sad, and we don't want to raise our child in a world like that." 

The San Francisco rally drew a few hundred people, who brought bongo drums and bullhorns. They briefly blocked some intersections as police officers formed lines beside them, and then listened to speeches in Justin Herman Plaza along the Embarcadero. 

At the Oakland rally, several hundred people listened to speeches made over a megaphone and painted signs before embarking on a long march, receiving applause from residents as they walked. 

"I don't think it's right for people to think it's OK to kill black and brown children and not pay for it," said Dina Suarez of Oakland, a 36-year-old preschool teacher. "It's enraging. It happens here in Oakland. It happened in Florida. I'm here in solidarity for the family (of Martin) and for all people of color who are tired of this repression."

I'm sure they're very sincere, but where were these clowns a few months ago when two white teen-age girls were shot by a young black man in the Fruitvale neighborhood because the girls didn't want to hang out with his GF? Where were they when a someone murdered 4 Oakland cops? Where were they last year when a young black man shot a white baby in his stroller when his mom didn't cough up some cash fast enough. Where were they when a black man who, while holding up a gas station, managed to shoot a 10-year old Hispanic boy who was playing the piano in a near-by house? I could go on, but discussing the murderousness of young black men against innocent members of society is one of the great taboos of the post-racial age. 

RS McCain offers the perfect riposte to the aggrieved "thug4life" types, teeing off of some idiot's tweet:

Here's the tweet:



And, here's McCain:

“Y’all people made us pick cotton?” 

Who is this “y’all,” and who is “us”? You never picked any cotton, Basit, and I never made you pick it. Whence this idea that there is some sort of permanent system of collective guilt and collective victimhood, where people who never once in their own lives suffered injustice can claim an eternal cause of grievance against people they don’t even know? 

My great-grandfather died long before I was ever born, but I knew his daughter — my grandmother, who lived past 90 — and she lived in a farmhouse on the red clay hills of Randolph County, Alabama, near the Little Tallapoosa River. There was no indoor plumbing. She drew her water from a well and cooked on a wood stove. 

“Y’all people made us pick cotton?” 

You never picked cotton, Basit, but my parents did. My aunts and uncles and grandparents picked cotton. Picked cotton all day long in the Alabama sun until their fingers bled, and took great pride in the fact that they earned a living by their own labor. 

When my father was 16, he told my grandmother she would never have to worry about him. He moved to West Point, Georgia, and took a job at a cotton mill to pay his room and board so he could attend West Point High School, where he made the All-Valley football team playing end for the Red Raiders. College recruiters were interested in Bill McCain, but two weeks before his 18th birthday, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He joined the Army and was a sergeant in a forward reconnaissance unit in France when, one morning in 1944, he was cooking breakfast outside a farmhouse when an artillery shell hit. A shard of shrapnel hit him at the base of his neck, and came with a fraction of an inch of killing him. The medic told him, “You got a million-dollar wound, Mack” — not crippled or maimed, but bad enough he’d never have to go back into combat. 

My Dad grew up on a Randolph County farm during the Depression, worked his way through high school, earned a Purple Heart fighting the Nazis in France, and attended the University of Alabama on the G.I. Bill. He moved to Atlanta after he graduated from Tuscaloosa, and worked 37 years at the Lockheed aircraft plant in Marietta. “Hold your head up, boy,” he’d say. “Ain’t nobody better than you.” 

“Y’all people made us pick cotton?”

"You never picked cotton and I never made you pick it." I'm gonna have to remember that one.