Opinion : The Zimmerman case, and the right to get out of the way

While teaching my kids to drive, I tell them, “You sometimes have the right of way. You always have the right to get out of the way.”

This lesson also applies to life -- and the big story in the national news this week.

But first, a personal example:

It was 1989, maybe 1990. Early summer. While still waiting for my dream job in journalism, I was working the second shift at Iowa Ham Canning in Independence. I lived a few blocks away from work and several blocks away from Veterans Park, along the Wapsipinicon River. I often would go to that park late at night – midnight, maybe, or even as late as 1 or 2 a.m.

One of the nice things about small town living is that you can – virtually at any time -- do this safely. I never worried when I went to the park that I would not be able to go home safely.

Except once.

One night, it had been raining, with a bit of thunder and lightning, so instead of getting out of the car and walking around the park or sitting on a bench by the river, I just sat in my car in the parking lot.

A few minutes after I arrived, I saw in my rear view mirror about four or five squad cars pull up in front of a house across the street. Several officers began walking around, looking for something – or someone.

One of them spotted me and walked over to my car. I put the window down.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Sitting in my car,” I replied. “I just came back from the store, where I bought diapers. I came here for some time to be alone quietly.” I patted the package of diapers as I spoke.

He was not interested in diapers. He had a question.

“You haven’t been running through this neighborhood knocking on doors, have you?”

No, I replied.

What I thought was, “Seriously? I have a full-time job, a part-time job and two toddlers at home. I have nothing better to do with my time than run through my neighborhood in a thunderstorm, knocking on doors?”

But I only said, “No.”

Apparently I looked dry enough to be believable.

The officer then asked me to leave the premises.

He didn’t have the right to ask me to leave. I was on a public street. I was doing nothing wrong.

But I left.

I was exercising, in terms of citizenship, my right to get out of the way.

That is a right two men in Florida failed to exercise on a dark night, and it led to tragedy.

It’s hard to take sides in the George Zimmerman/Treyvon Martin case, even after the not guilty verdict, because just about everyone involved, starting with Zimmerman and Martin, did and said things that are indefensible.

Zimmerman was wrong in the first place. Although hardly anyone in the news has said this, Zimmerman failed miserably in the very first duty of a “Neighborhood Watch” participant: He did not bother finding out who his neighbors are.

He also erred, it seems, in his initial conversation with Treyvon Martin. 
The entire incident could have been avoided if Zimmerman had cordially greeted the teen said, “Hey, I am from the Neighborhood Watch. Is everything OK?”

But he didn’t.

Martin, likewise, could have responded to Zimmerman by saying, “Hey, I am just walking to my dad’s place. It’s right over there.”

But he didn’t.

Everyone knows what happened next, while we may never know for certain which percentage of blame each deserves for the conflict that escalated until one of them was dead and the other bleeding from his head.

This whole case isn’t about hoodies, gun rights, gun control, "standing your ground," or whether the President’s son would look like Treyvon Martin.

It’s not even about an “unarmed child” being shot. Our society shoots unarmed children just about every day, and very few of their names ever fall from the President’s lips, or make it to network TV news. I think every one of those children who is killed deserves at least one moment in the national spotlight. I also think the killing of our children will continue until each murdered child gets his or her moment in the spotlight and enough Americans start asking why we are killing so many of our kids and what must we to to make the killing stop.

If I had a grandson, he would probably look like Antonio West Santiago.

You don’t know who that is? Look it up. Then after you find out about this innocent, unarmed child who was killed by a suspect of another race, and you want to blame “the media” for not telling you about it, I won’t take it personally.

The Zimmerman-Martin case is all about knowing, remembering, and fulfilling our obligations as a citizen.

My obligation that summer night 20-some years was to give up a tiny portion of my rights and leave an area where officers were investigating a report of a crime. It was, of course, a bogus, if sincere, report, filed by some nervous goof who can’t tell the difference between thunder and a knock-knock joke.

But yielding my ground was the appropriate thing to do. That officer, though in error, wasn’t trying to violate my rights; he was just trying to figure out if something evil was in progress. And there were several other public parks available if I still wanted to go to them.

By leaving, I was making his job, and my life, easier.

If George Zimmerman and Treyvon Martin had exercised some of that deference, that putting the good of another person ahead of one’s own, the teen would still be alive, and the man would be anonymous. And our society would have one less unnecessary scar on our history of racial relations -- and a lot less mindless political blabbering and media hand-wringing.