"Well, right, it’s very easy to feel defeated when the false becomes true. You can think of the Law as an enormous simulation of the world, where everything has been accounted for with some legal approximation. Questions are fed into it, you turn the crank, and out comes ‘what happened,’ according to the Law. This is why bad verdicts hurt so much: they are given the force of truth. Laws are general truths that we enact inside this system. Verdicts are the further, particular truths deduced from these. Laws against murder erect a set of truths about human life, and murder verdicts establish the truth about particular acts that cause someone’s death. Laws define reality inside this legal simulation of the world, and verdicts compute the truths that populate it. Every single one of us has—from the moment of our conception—lived inside this simulation and been shaped by what it deems true. The Law is the most powerful machine we use to manufacture our reality. George Zimmerman’s defense attorney placed a large piece of concrete before the jury box during his closing arguments and, referring to it, said “That is cement, that is a sidewalk, and that is not an unarmed teen carrying nothing but Skittles, trying to get home.” He went on to say that Trayvon Martin used the “availability” of the sidewalk on which he was standing as a weapon against George Zimmerman. However powerful the Law may seem when it shapes our reality, it is still only a machine. And when you feed it horrendous bullshit like Stand Your Ground, it is very much garbage in, garbage out. If you decide that a basic truth of reality ought to be the right to kill to soothe one’s own anxiety, then the machine will obediently compute the disgusting absurdity that a teenager is armed if he has access to a sidewalk and that the only innocent posture a person can adopt is that of being unmoored from gravity, bobbing helplessly in space. These disgusting absurdities have now been given the force of truth. This is dangerous because truth does not convince or persuade. The truth is much too powerful for that. Rather, truth creates the kind of person required to believe it. This recently computed truth will create two kinds of people. First, it will needlessly duplicate George Zimmerman into a legion of armed cowards and, second, it will add enormously to a second class of people: victims. Some members of this second group will be subject to the physical predation of the first. But all of them will be victims of a far more tragic kind of violence. They will be the kind of people who cannot imagine an escape from the reality this legal truth has created. The kind of people for whom injustice is woven into the physical matter they stand on and on which the law of gravity compels them to remain. The most important freedom it is possible for a human to experience will be denied to this kind of person. This is the freedom to crawl towards the wall separating our legal simulation of reality from the wilderness it was created to exclude. To see beyond it, and to glimpse the indigenous truths, whose beauty is so frequently destroyed when they are captured, and slaved to society’s aims." - lazenby.tumblr
Posted on: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 03:31:15 +0000
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