{"id":9791,"date":"2013-07-16T07:00:26","date_gmt":"2013-07-16T11:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=9791"},"modified":"2013-07-16T07:00:26","modified_gmt":"2013-07-16T11:00:26","slug":"im-not-trayvon-martin-i-was-way-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2013\/07\/16\/im-not-trayvon-martin-i-was-way-worse\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m not Trayvon Martin. I was way worse."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"trayvon<\/a>There’s a meme going around the internet and in street protests this week that has people proclaiming, “I am Trayvon Martin.”<\/p>\n

But thinking about that seventeen-year-old boy’s death and the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who shot him, I keep thinking, “Uh, no.\u00a0 I was a lot<\/em> worse than Trayvon Martin.”<\/p>\n

Let’s rehearse what we know about the kid who was gunned down last year.<\/p>\n

We know he did drugs, smoking at least enough marijuana to get caught and suspended from school.<\/p>\n

I went to a rural high school where drinking and smoking marijuana were as commonplace as doing homework.<\/p>\n

I never got suspended for it, only because it was the culture of that time and place to look the other way.\u00a0 I remember kids making bongs in art and shop class.<\/p>\n

There is also some evidence that Martin stole things.\u00a0 He was found at one point with what may have been a “burglary tool.”<\/p>\n

When I was a kid, I was a certifiable klepto.\u00a0 I’m ashamed to admit it now, but my decidedly casual moral and ethical boundaries ranged from theft to harassment to vandalism.<\/p>\n

I’m sure some of my high school friends will correct me if I’m misremembering this, but I seem to recall one lazy, bored small-town summer when we actually made a game of pestering police officers — a kind of high-stakes hide and seek.<\/p>\n

Except, really, the stakes weren’t so very high.<\/p>\n

In my rural, white world, it was understood that kids would get up to hijinks.\u00a0 I’m not excusing my behavior — it was appalling, shameful, idiotic.<\/p>\n

I’m merely pointing out that where I come from, a kid was expected to do far, far worse than anything Trayvon Martin did as a sort of rite of passage, as a way of sowing wild oats.<\/p>\n

Some kid acting like a screw-up didn’t prompt anyone to reach for their pistol.<\/p>\n

On the contrary.\u00a0 There’s actually a whole genre of American movies — “American Graffiti,” “Animal House,” “American Pie,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” — romanticizing teen rebellion.<\/p>\n