The coverage in recent weeks of the Trayvon Martin issue has brought out a lot of passion in people. It has underlined a sad comment about a good number of people in our society. We are so eager to be right; to feel that our long held beliefs are correct, we are willing to overlook facts, to shade the truth and outright lie to be right.

I have been foolish enough to dive into the murky waters of commentary on some news websites when I have seen people make, and let me be honest and call it what it is, stupid comments. These have not been people who are making opinions on issues, these are people ignoring the facts of an issue. I have avoided commenting on people directly about the case. Certain things can, I realize, be disputed. When I have seen, on many occasions, people writing “Zimmerman can't be a racist because he is Hispanic,” I'm sorry, they have to be called on it. Just because he is Hispanic doesn't mean he can't be a racist.

At first, my heart felt a bit better after some bitter debate this morning. It was about as stupid a discussion as you can imagine. There had been an article released that talked about how some fans were upset that two characters from Hunger Games were portrayed by black characters. I saw the movie and having not read the book, I did a quick check on the situation. Not only did it seem the characters were black in the book, by the description given, but the author said they were black. This was stated on the official website of the book. What struck me as odd about the initial story was two fold; someone who was a fan of the books would have read the passage that described them as black. The other telling thing was this movie has been promoted like crazy for a year. The roles had been cast for at least that long, with pictures floating all over the web of the characters. It seems odd that after the movie came out, people who call themselves fans of the book would be surprised the characters would be black.

I was scrolling through the comments and one person made an off field comment about how whites suffer from affirmative action. I couldn't help myself and said he must be starved for attention to make such a terrible comment and I went and did other stuff. When I checked my Facebook page just thirty minutes ago, I had some strange likes from people I didn't recognize. I clicked on the link and it took me to the article I responded to earlier. Apparently the guy and a few other people, about 3, took offense to what I had said. Before I could get too mad I saw there were 35 hidden comments to the string. I opened it up and to my surprise the 35 comments were people who defended me. Three against and 35 for gave me a bit of hope for Americans.

Well that went away when I hit another site! It was an article on Geraldo Rivera seeming to make an apology for the hoddie firestorm he sparked over the weekend. There was a person who made a comment that was a classic deflection. He wondered why all the racial political people, the liberal media, you get the idea of where this guy's head was, didn't focus on three black guys who killed a student in Mississippi? I saw some folks had responded to him and honestly I was too drained to get my blood boiling in a tit-for-tat game, but I wanted to see if the guy was being truthful in his statement.

A quick Google search destroyed his argument in a dramatic way. It was interesting what he decided to highlight, because the first article I pulled up about the story talked about two separate killings of Mississippi college students that were unrelated. He wanted to focus on the one where a student was killed by three black men. The initial article I read didn't say what the race of the victim was, but the article did state the three suspects were quickly arrested and were in custody. The article mentioned how the cooperation of multiple law enforcement agencies helped in solving the case. A little more searching revealed the person killed was John Sanderson, a white college student from Mississippi State University. There was no motive for his killing.

The second killing, the one the commentator didn't acknowledge, was Nolan Ryan Henderson III, a black student attending Jackson State University. This killing happened a few hours after the Sanderson shooting. There are no suspects or a motive in the Henderson case.

To me, obviously both deaths are a tragedy and both seem like senseless killings, but the writer who brought up the one case and not the other was bound and determined to show that no one cared about a white guy getting shot. On the contrary. What is it that needs to be done in the Sanderson case? The shooting happened on Saturday night and by Monday morning three suspects were in custody. A coordinated effort by campus security and the local police apprehended the three suspects. In the death he ignored, Henderson was killed with no witnesses, no suspects. While he might complain about the lack of coverage he feels occurred in the Sanderson case, he has been complicit in not giving coverage to the Henderson case. It was the lack of action by the police department and the lack of coverage by the mainstream press, after almost a month after his death, that made the Trayvon Martin case an issue. So in trying to prove the racial bias of the people who have promoted the Tayvon Martin issue, the commentator proved their point.