Shortly after the Zimmerman verdict, a group of mostly young Floridians, mostly college students, calling themselves the Dream Defenders camped out in Governor Rick Scott’s office to protest Florida’s stand-your-ground law. The protest has attracted some high-profile figures like Jesse Jackson and Harry Belafonte.
Despite the fact that I disagree with their stance, and also think they have no direction (re: Zimmerman trial did not involve SYG at all), even if I were on their side, I would still make fun of their stupid name. “Dream”? Whose dream? Defending it? How? Is this like the Avengers, where they’re not really avenging anything, except at least they have a badass giant green guy.
Checking their website, they offer a lot of slogans, very few actual concrete details, like from their website I understand they’re worried about race and prisons, but SYG stuff has no details at all.
Chance of success? Low. Imitators? Maybe, or at least “chapters.”
IOW State Representative Matt Gaetz appears to be correct -
[QUOTE=Matt Gaetz]
I think you have protesters in the Capitol today who are protesting without a whole lot of knowledge about the fact patterns associated with Stand Your Ground.
[/QUOTE]
It seems the “Dream Defenders” don’t know what they are supposed to be protesting, and are thrashing around trying to find something. They have already met with the governor. There has already been a task force that reviewed the laws. There is nothing resembling a grass-roots push against SYG in Florida, and nobody except these time-wasting twits thinks Florida needs a special session to review the laws yet again.
A few dozen morons with nothing better to do with their time than whine about how badly criminals are treated. Sounds like the basis for a world-shaking movement to me. Only, not.
How incredibly lazy. In what world does linking to a 9 page thread with no other comment support your statement in any way? Do you think this makes your point stronger? You could link to hereand it would have the same effect.
Hard to see how SYG fits into their overall mission. The “Crisis” statement on their website reads:
I agree with some of that, but fail to see how a self-defense law impacts any of it. Legislation that will address “school-based arrests and exclusionary disciplines, “zero tolerance” policies, analysis of school-based arrest data, and police training on racial and bias-based profiling” does, however. Hard not to see this as a headline-grab, using a topical, visible issue to attract eyeballs and attention to an unrelated cause.
That’s certainly simple enough for me, because I was instilled with values by my parents and community that included obedience to the law, rejection of violence and the honor culture, respect for women and avoidance of unplanned pregnancy, and the importance of education and delayed gratification. Also, I had a ready alternative to a life of crime: a life of gainful employment.
Not everyone benefited from that worldview or those prospects, however. Transmitting those values and creating employment prospects are worthy goals, though the Dream Defenders site is rather silent on values and family, and long on anti-corporate rhetoric, e.g. . “Our schools are falling apart, our job prospects are low, and our communities are caught in a cycle of incarceration. All to satisfy the greed of a corporate class seeking to further disfranchise us at every turn.”
Repealing Stand Your Ground won’t make a measurable difference in the lives of the people the Dream Defenders claim to represent, and it certainly has nothing to do with this “corporate class” and their greed, which somehow destroys schools and employment prospects.
Well, I think that’s mostly a hook on which to hang the whole thing. Or, put another way, the catalyst in the solution. They struck while that iron was hot. (Sometimes mixing metaphors is like mixing pigments.) Not that they necessarily consciously approached it that way. I think certain students sharing a general set of discontents got really mad over the Zimmerman verdict, as a lot of Floridians and Americans of all colors did, and decided to Do Something, and when they all got together they discovered they had a broader common agenda worth fighting for. Which it is.
Hard to say what portion of the upset-at-the-verdict group is also on board for the prison/education/police reform ideas, and how competent the Dream Defenders leadership will be at harnessing their collective power. The verdict could be rallying point that gets people together to Do Something, or it could bring them together only until their underlying differences, and the the long odds against changing the SYG law, force them apart again. It’d surely help if SYG had actually been relevant to Zimmerman’s case, beyond just delaying his arrest (a decision that was vindicated by his acquittal).
Given those long odds, shifting to their broader goals makes sense, but dilutes the message and threatens whatever anti-SYG coalition they have cobbled together.
I’ll say this, also: the Dream Defenders’ apparent non-whites-only policy for leadership (“We are a human rights organization, directed by Black & Brown youth…”) makes me rather uncomfortable.
1.518 million are ineligible felons, including 23% of the adult black population, a group the Dream Defenders plan to target. That leaves about 982,000 who are eligible and unregistered.
If I had to wager, I’d bet on their failure to register 61,500: they just don’t seem all that well-organized; their publicized goal, repealing SYG, differs from their core mission; their base appears to be colleges and universities; and that’s a lot of work for an organization with a permanent staff of 5.