How do we stop a repeat of Kyle Rittenhouse’s story?

Kyle Rittenhouse would have been about nine years old when George Zimmerman volunteered to patrol a Florida neighborhood and trailed a Black teenager he didn’t recognize, thinking he might be up to no good. The unarmed teen, Trayvon Martin, was shot and killed. Zimmerman was acquitted.

And he was reportedly greatly interested when in August of last year, a Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back as he held a knife while resisting being served a warrant in front of his children. Kenosha is about 30 minutes from the Illinois home where Rittenhouse lives with his mother.

The incident, which resulted in Blake’s semi-paralysis, kicked off what has sadly become a familiar pattern in America: People swarm communities to protest police actions and it is mostly peaceful. And then, usually later into the night, and often after an imposed curfew, people with different intentions take to the streets. These are the militia, wannabe police sorts and some bent on destruction, fire-setting and looting.

As Rittenhouse’s trial begins for the shooting deaths of two men and the wounding of another, one question begs: How’d he get there?

But even more than that: How did we all get here? After all, the whole country has seen the Blue Lives and Black Lives debates, with the loudest voices arguing that one should matter more than the other. Sound bites and easy talking points have always overwhelmed what should be substantive conversations about far deeper matters of policing, race, historical patterns of neglect and community.

But for Rittenhouse’s generation the chorus of arguing has been a soundtrack. And he appears to have listened to one song on repeat.

How many other young people are susceptible to the voices that goaded Rittenhouse toward violence? Moreover, what can stop a repeat of his story?

Rittenhouse is still a teenager at 18. He was 17 when he apparently became so enamored with military gauge guns and a version of a fight for the soul of America, that he eagerly set himself up for what happened that August night.

In a widely disseminated video, just moments after gunning down two men, Rittenhouse can be seen carting his Smith & Wesson AR-15 style .223 rifle in front like a hunter walking a field, passing patrol cars and armored tactical units swarming the street, as bystanders scream and point him out as the shooter. Police don’t stop him.

Within days, the young man is lauded as a hero by a wide swath of influential and highly paid professionals in conservative media and some politicians and those who see him as a symbol, rather than as a young man in deep, serious trouble.

The trial will decide if Rittenhouse’s actions were self-defense according to Wisconsin law. Those laws seem to favor Rittenhouse, as prosecutors will need to debunk his claims of a reasonable fear of imminent death or great bodily harm. And they’ll need to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

The judge has already pricked some sensibilities with his decision that the deceased can’t be called “victims” during trial as that would be prejudicial.

Rittenhouse, in some ways, is a victim too.

Illicit choirs stoking vigilante justice echoed in this young man’s head for much of his short life. How he reacted to it has shaped his future.

As the trial unfolds, a secondary outcome would be for America to start reassessing those voices. We don’t have to replay the same soundtrack.