I was thinking I could link up some happy news stories this morning (Nicholas Kistroff’s Wednesday’s column “A Free Miracle Food” and the “Music Man, Merry Band” article published on Friday). The phone app I use for the New York Times is of course clunky in that I have not found a way to bookmark articles using it. Instead I email myself the link. Unfortunately, the link is to the mobile.nytimes.com site and takes you to a page designed just for mobile apps.

So in order to continue bookmarking the pages from the actual NYtimes.com website, I have to go online and search for the article to bookmark it with my other pages on diigo.com where I have bookmarks that reflect years of bookmarking.

Anyway, this morning I thought I would like to bookmark the story “Music Man, Merry Band” and figured it would easily be found on the Arts page of today’s NYtimes.com. Unfortunately my eye fell on the lead articles announcing George Zimmerman’s acquittal.

Even though I was expecting this verdict I found the story very dismaying. It’s hard not to see this case as about anything but race and violence. But Florida law, incompetence in the police investigation (they contaminated evidence), and possible overreach of prosecutors all came together and created reasonable doubt in the legal sense.

Out here in my world I have no doubt that something wrong happened here. A man died. A tragedy.

Yesterday I bookmarked Charles Blow’s insightful pre-verdict article. Beyond the Courtroom – NYTimes.com, in which he quotes the African proverb “Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.”

Blow seems to expect the verdict that happened. One problem he points to in this kind of case is that the dead are unable to tell their story. Hence the proverb.

And then there’s this disturbing news story: Fla. mom gets 20 years for firing warning shots – CBS News. Same state. No one killed. But apparently the defense team was unable to invoke the law that protected Zimmerman. Oh yeah. The woman is black. She fired warning shots at her abusive husband.

I certainly don’t have answers for all this stuff. Just questions  and sadness. I think I’m going to leave it at that today. I’ll put up a happier links a different day.