3 men who decided to play God

Ahmaud is not here, but he heard the verdicts. He knows, in that place where his restless soul resides, that his death has been avenged. It does not bring him back, nor does it end the grief of his mother, whose tears did not depend upon the final word of the jury but will ebb and flow for the rest of her own life. It will not stop the pundits, activists and zealots from making their political cases and their pretextual stands, and it will not stop people like me from writing things that Ahmaud will never see.

But an overwhelming white jury in Georgia found that three white men had stalked a Black man for no legitimate reason, gunned him down and then tried to justify their actions under the false argument of “enforcing the law.” That is weighty, that is substantial, and that matters.

Others will tie this to race, and only the most jaded or ignorant would deny that if Ahmaud were white he would likely still be alive. The 911 tape caught one of his killers saying that the problem they had was a “Black man” running around the neighborhood.

Beyond the issue of race, there is the fact that a man who did nothing wrong was targeted for extermination because three narcissists decided their right to play lawman was more important than his right to life. These pathetic, overweight, inarticulate Marshall Dillon wannabes arrogated to themselves the privilege of omniscience. They decided that their ability to figure out what was criminal or legal, what was normal or an aberration, what was acceptable or beyond the pale, was absolute. And they used their guns to underline that point.

I am not against guns. I do not oppose the Second Amendment. I do not despise the NRA. But it’s clear that guns are part of the problem here. The guns did not kill Ahmaud by themselves, inanimate objects waiting for the energy and purpose of a human actor. But they are the proximate reason that a man is dead. I hope that there is a push to examine the way that civilians use guns in pseudo law enforcement situations as opposed to when they are defending themselves. This is different from the Kyle Rittenhouse case, where a jury justifiably found a young man to have acted lawfully to protect himself from an obvious aggression.

The Georgia case is about three men who decided to play God, and deliberately and with the malice a jury found at least one of them to have, stalked a man who posed no threat to them and who, in fact, didn’t even know them.

The fact that the jury spent less than a day deliberating in this matter shows how little daylight there was between a just verdict and reasonable doubt. There was no doubt that Travis McMichael stalked Ahmaud Arbery, and that race was at least part of the reason. There was no doubt that the other two men, including his father, were so assured of their infallibility and secure in their privilege that they filmed the event. They filmed themselves killing a man, thinking that this video evidence would be seen as justification for their rogue actions. They probably even expected to be praised for their bravery and initiative once the video was made public and shared on social media.

They might even have thought they’d be heralded as heroes on national television.

Well, that video was shared, and they did make it into the national spotlight. The thing is, they never expected to be on the wrong end of a jury, a judge, a prosecutor and public opinion. And that is part of the tragedy.

We all mourn the death of Ahmaud Arbery. We join, from a distance, in his mother’s grief. But with these verdicts, we have found a way to have faith in the system of justice. Refuse to let the pundits who get paid spin partisan fables and fairy tales. Refuse to let them convince you that this verdict wasn’t powerful, and that it wasn’t enough. It was, and it will continue to be, just as the Rittenhouse verdict with which it will always be twinned will be a tribute to the virtue of 12 men and women, endowed with the superpowers of the Constitution.

This was a November to give thanks.

The fact that the jury spent less than a day deliberating in this matter shows how little daylight there was between a just verdict and reasonable doubt.