America's favorite guy to hate: George Zimmerman

The name George Zimmerman has been one of the most well-known names in American media outlets.  Since his acquittal in 2012 in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, he has been caught up again and again in the news.  Since his not “guilty verdict”, he has had had three separate girlfriends accuse him of abusive behavior (one even claiming he smashed an iPad in a fit of anger), he has been caught up in a road-rage incident with a man named Matthew Apperson, and now, most recently, he has been shot at.  George Zimmerman’s attacker in the recent event, the same Apperson as the road rage incident, has since been arrested and is in custody with several serious charges pending.  So far, the legal system has yet to find any evidence of this man doing anything wrong in ANY of the previously mentioned events. 

This has not stopped the court of public opinion from finding him to be a criminal who always sleezes his way out of trouble.  Is this what American justice has come to today?  Trials be damned and courts need not intervene, the people know all they need to know.  The people have already found him guilty of being a racist, murdering, abusive little troll who deserves to be the victim of whatever some vigilante wants to do to him. 

The most recent incident has ignited the Twitter world with an entire hashtag #WhenIHeardZimmermanGotShot posting over 12000 tags and his name being mentioned closed to 300,000 times.  In the vast majority of cases, people lamented that Zimmerman wasn’t a blood splatter on the pavement of Lake Mary, Florida.  People celebrate his attacker, and feel a sense of poetic justice in anything awful that happens to the man.  This is the new America, unfortunately.  A white-man (though even that is in question) has been dubbed a racist by the mainstream media and thus he is no longer deserving of due process and protection under the law. 

Has vigilante justice made a come back?  Can we expect more lynching by anti-racist mobs?  Why don’t we just take Zimmerman out to a sycamore tree and string him up?  The behavior of the media and twitterverse is shameful at best.  It shows not only a bias that 21st Century public opinion has on those dubbed “racist”, it also shines a light into a bigger problem of a lack of faith in the American people towards our justice system.