Linger.

words. 

"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. 

...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.) 

...There is a mother who will never again see her son’s impish smile or feel his warm body collapsing into her open arms. There is a father who won’t be able to straighten his son’s tie or tell him “You missed a spot” after a shave. There is a brother who will never be able to trade jokes and dreams and what-ifs with him well into the night, long after both should be asleep. The death of a child blasts a hole into the fabric of a family, one that can never truly be mended. I refuse to believe that was God’s plan for Martin’s family.

...As Mahatma Gandhi once said: “There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.”

In that court, it is hard to avoid righteous conviction. Maybe that’s part of God’s plan."

THE NEW YORK TIMES: The Sadness Lingers

EARLIER:

WORDS.

A Moment of Clarity.