The George Zimmerman trail went to the jury today and since the attorneys started their final arguments, pundits on the left and the right have called for ‘calm.’ The prevailing belief is no matter the verdict, and pardon the way that I’m going to address this, the natives will get restless. I feel insulted by both sides. The right wing talk show hosts are preparing people for race wars. Type in Trayvon Martin race war in a Google search and look at all the articles addressing the issue, either by those on the left making mockery of the possibility, but still insisting for calm, or those on the right who are blaming everyone from the media to ‘race peddlers’ who are inciting violence.

True story, Monday my air conditioner was broken and it took a long time for the maintenance guy to get to my apartment. I was watching the news and when he arrived there happened to be a story about the Zimmerman trial. He starts talking to me about how the media is evil and trying to manipulate black people into going to the streets. He then said, making pains to say he wasn’t a racist, Zimmerman was in his rights to shoot Trayvon because Trayvon was a punk.

Let me explain how I felt listening to this him talk about this for fifteen minutes while he fixed my air conditioner. I felt trapped. Why? If I were to speak my mind, told the maintenance man how insulted I felt by his obviously uninformed statement, would my air conditioner had been fixed? Since he had a master key to my place, if he felt angry about what I told him would I come home one day and find some of my stuff gone or trashed? Would he just leave, with me baking in my apartment?

Sure, you might say to yourself my thinking is a little paranoid, but a kid walking home from the store ended up dead. I doubt that was part of his plan. His friend testified in court and she, not Zimmerman, was the focus of a lot of angry and insulting comments about her weight, her speech and her attitude. Trayvon, the dead teenager, was painted by the defense subtlety and by right wing radio overtly, as a pot smoking, drug dealing, and ignorant thug who was looking to kill Zimmerman.

I’m in my own home, getting work done from a repair person, and the dialog he choose to initialize made me uncomfortable in my own home, yet I felt unable to do anything because I needed my air conditioner fixed. My little situation was minor but there are thousands of people who feel that powerless. They don’t feel safe in their own homes, in their place of work, in their cars. Obviously, not everything is about race but not everything should be dismissed as not being racial. We should have an open dialog about how we treat race in this country, but that is going to be difficult with so many preconceived ideas about race.

I never planned nor do I intend to riot in the street because of the verdict in the Zimmerman case. I didn’t riot when the verdict was handed down in the beat case of Rodney King, but I was looked at a lot by store owners in the days of the riot. I didn’t cheer with the verdict of the OJ Simpson trial, but I got a lot of people asking me about ‘my people’ when the verdict was announced. Surprisingly, no one asked my opinion when Jodi Arias was found guilty, yet the court steps were filled with people cheering that she was convicted. No riots. Please, everyone, stop assuming people are going to riot in the streets with the outcome of the verdict.