“Another thug gone. Pull up your pants and be respectful. Bye bye thug r.i.p.”
We need to take back the dialogue and staying silent isn’t going to get the job done. By all real accounts Trayvon was a thug. Members of that community may not like reading or hearing such comments, but lashing out at the person saying it isn’t going to fix their culture’s failures. Calling every person who speaks up and speaks out against those behaviors and attitudes that are failing a community isn’t a racist or a bigot.
Trayvon was a thug and the community let a good child slip through to the dark side. The longer we let the community wallow in denial of how they continue to fail their young people...the more we lose as a culture. Bad habits, bad culture should evolve to something better. Oddly, in America, it doesn’t. It doesn’t because we CAN’T talk about it, challenge it, and expose its’ failure to the light of day.
You are correct in saying we need to take back the dialogue, but that is not going to happen. We have transitioned from the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave to the land of the freebie and home of the gimme in less than one generation.