During an interview last year, George Zimmerman told Sean Hannity that shooting Trayvon Martin was "God's plan." Having sat through his second-degree-murder trial in the presence of the dead teen's parents, writes Charles Blow in the New York Times, perhaps Zimmerman would answer differently now.
One thing still hanging in the air when the lawyers in the George Zimmerman trial finished their closing arguments was sadness — heavy and thick, the choking kind, like acrid smoke.
Some questions will never be answered. And some facts will never be altered — chief among them, that there is a dead teenager with a hole in his heart sleeping in a Florida grave, a fact that never had to be.
Zimmerman told Sean Hannity last year that his shooting of Trayvon Martin was "God's plan" and that if he could do it all over he would do nothing different. (Later in the interview, Zimmerman equivocated a bit on the topic without identifying what specifically he would change.)
I don't pretend to know the heart of God or the details of his "plans," but I hasten to hope that he — or she — would value life over death, that free will is part of a faithful walk, that our mistakes are not automatically postscripted as part of a divine destiny.
I would also hope that Zimmerman, having sat through his murder trial in the presence of the dead teen's grieving parents, might answer Hannity differently. Maybe the answer he gave last year was part of a legal defense. Maybe now he would have more empathy.
Read Charles Blow's complete column at the New York Times.
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