The Ghost of Trayvon Martin Takes a Knee

Halloween is approaching and the stores are filling with candy, skeletons, and not a few ghosts. One specter once again raising its ugly head, is the ghost of Trayvon Martin.

In addition to the Take a Knee controversy, or complementary to it, four NFL players have submitted a ten page memo...manifesto, if you will, to Roger Goodell, NFL Commissioner. to address

the silence following our individual and collective demonstrations around the national anthem to raise awareness to racial inequality and issues surrounding criminal justice reform has been met with inconsistencies in press coverage and perceived lack of support.

(emphasis mine) "Criminal justice reform"?  Are they suggesting better communication between NFL players and their parole officers? There most certainly is racial inequality in the NFL. The percentage of black players far surpasses the percentage of blacks in the general population.

But, let's examine the basis for their call for a month dedicated to their particular vision of social justice awareness..."like breast cancer"! Oh, and pony up some dough to make this kabuki theater work.

You have to admire the chutzpah of a bunch of millionaires going hat in hand to NFL management to finance those things they feel deeply enough, just not deeply enough to pay for it out of their own pockets.

But, what sparked the outrage?

Since 2016, police have shot over 300 men and women in this country. Some of the names and stories are familiar...Trayvon Martin...

Uh, excuse me, but Trayvon wasn't shot by a police officer, despite how often his ghost pops up in conversations about Black Lives Mattering.

Well, we have some newer statistics, via the Washington Post:

721 fatal police shootings in U S so far in 2017

32 unarmed - 4.4%

9 unarmed black men - 1.2%

For the math impaired (and you liberals know who you are), 721 is greater than 300.  As to the myth that police regular shoot unarmed black men, it appears that sightly over 1% of fatal police shootings involve unarmed black men and unarmed men other than black, are shot three times as often.

But the memo goes on to detail many "reforms" they want to see in many of arrests and bail. Could they have a vested interest in the matter? According to NFLarrest.com, an NFL player is arrested on an average of every seven days. Granted this is lower than the US arrest rate for men of their demographic, but still quite a lot. Enough to make me wonder just how altruistic this "movement" is. "DUI's" seem to be most prevalent, and if they occurred at at once, could fill a small stadium all by themselves!

But back to Trayvon, and the Left's fixation on him. You remember Trayvon?? Twelve year old choir boy with a twinkle in his eye? Well, somewhere between the cherubic twelve year old and the thuggish, 5'11" seventeen year old, something went terribly wrong.

In October 2011, after a video surveillance camera caught Martin writing graffiti on a door, MDSPD Office Darryl Dunn searched Martin’s backpack, looking for the marker he had used. Officer Dunn found 12 pieces of women’s jewelry and a man’s watch, along with a flathead screwdriver the officer described as a “burglary tool.” The jewelry and watch, which Martin claimed he had gotten from a friend he refused to name, matched a description of items stolen during the October 2011 burglary of a house... about a half-mile from the school.

Now why, you may ask , am I dredging up this thug's sordid history? Can't we just let sleeping, er, dead dogs lie? Apparently not. The name of Trayvon Martin, who was definitely not shot by a white cop or a black cop, or any cop at all, is being repeatedly evoked at the top of the list of victimhood by Black Lives Matter types, along with the brutal bully who was shot resisting arrest, Michael Brown.

It is the modus operandi of the Left, that whenever they want to exaggerate how bad a problem is, they pad their statistics to make it look worse. The NFL includes Trayvon in their list of grievances, because if they limited themselves to actual grievances or even current grievances (Trayvon was killed in 2012), their justification would be very thin.

I suspect the ghost of Trayvon will be with us for a long time, so long as intellectually dishonest race baiters struggle for ways to justify their left of center agendas. 

This includes the 'Take a Knee' crowd.