Billie Holiday tagged posts

There are these moments. Moments of extreme elation and bliss, abject fear and terror, crystalline understanding. Moments of such intensity that our everyday somnolence is exposed as a kind of fraud, a delusion we perpetuate in order to keep at bay the dueling hounds of our fragility and immensity, our contingency and divinity.

A late dinnertime run to the store for a few items; the daughter had volunteered to cook. Dark as we turn onto our block, no streetlights to illumine the way. In the headlights, a man in the middle of the street, first starting to cross, then doubling back, then pausing too long in the middle as I approach and instinctively slow, him sloughing off late as I swing wide and recognize him—Michael.

Young dad, good man.

Strange for him to be so unyielding of the road. Another man stands on the sidewalk; they seem in contact.
Pulling near our house up the block, I ease to the curb and m...

None of us, save for George Zimmerman, will ever know exactly what happened the night he shot and killed Trayvon Martin at close range with a bullet from his 9 millimeter semi-automatic handgun. Reactions to the killing and Zimmerman’s eventual acquittal fell along the usual and predictable faultlines of American life: African-Americans and white liberals decrying the verdict as racially tinged, with most other whites and conservatives pointing to inconclusive evidence in supporting the acquittal.

According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted early this week and cited by NPR, “86 percent of African-Americans expressed dissatisfaction with the verdict, compared with just 30 percent of whites.”

Determining Zimmerman’s legal culpability was a matter for the jurors to decide, and the jurors have spoken...