Al, I'm feelin your posts, and it's sad that it took three pages of hypotheticals to point out some obvious shit.

We tell our kids in every single capacity to be fearful of being approached by strange men. To this day, when a shady sucker strolls towards me on the street or a vehicle suddenly pulls up or stops by me, my heart skips a beat, and I'm in my thirties for Christ's sake. That fear of being assaulted or stolen may lessen with age, but it never really goes away. How it is that Mr. Stranger-Danger can approach a teenager on the street and yet so many grown-ass adults can't even empathize with said young man tells me a whole lot more than where our country stands with guns or race.

Americans generally love innocent little children, babies, fetuses.... But as soon as the child turns into a teen, they become foreign, frightening, potentially deadly monsters capable of flash mobs and columbine. The adults, charged with running this madhouse, will gladly use them for whatever purposes we can profit from in return, like zero-tolerance laws, the school-to-prison pipeline, the lifetime slavery-inducing college debtors industrial complex. Or give permission to abuse them like the police and Catholic priests. Medicate them with psychtropics until they kill themselves. And then have the nerve to wonder why it is that the young people are so quick to turn on us.

If I was in Tre Martin's shoes and approached by some creepyfuk like George Zimmerman, I would have beat his head in the first chance I had too.