There's Any Such Thing As Grieving

I've made no attempts to be topical here, so I don't feel a need to comment on specific news stories when they come around. (Editorial Explanations is my spot for politics, anyway, and even there the point is to illuminate the slant rather than the truth.)

But the story of that unlucky, murdered young man Trayvon Martin keeps coming up, and it keeps reminding me -- reminding all of us, I hope -- that we're not as post-racial and tolerant and balanced and upright as we like to think we are. Sure, it's never fair to extrapolate from one story, but this one is so reminiscent of so many other stories.

And what it keeps reminding me of, is this quintessentially sad song by Sinead O'Connor, about another dead black boy -- under completely different circumstances, of course, except for being pursued by men convinced that a black man couldn't possibly be as innocent as he actually was -- and how there's always another death to remind us that things don't really change: