We lived in Florida for five years, before our older boy Will was born. It was a very decent neighborhood, although not in the nicest zip code. Lake Apopka was nearby, a significant body of water reminiscent of  Homer Simpson's Lake Springfield and just as polluted: Even the gators didn't care much for it, and whatever was swimming in it on moonlight nights, creating ripples and splashes: Well, it wasn't fish. Still, we really loved the people there, and it was home.

If you passed far enough north, near very nice Lake Mary - think of the homes of professional golfers, basketball players, baseball players, and the like - eventually you arrived in Sanford. It was not a happy place, a railroad town renowned at the time for its racial divisions. There were older nice sections in Sanford; I recall driving through some. There was a zoo there, with a pony ride for Will that ended each of our visits. But it wasn't much of a zoo, and the crowd visiting there looked pretty rough. Heck, we looked kind of rough: Those were the years we searched under sofa cushions for loose coins to bank before our bill payments were cashed.

Sanford was real Florida, away from Busch Gardens and Disney. In a sense, Florida has been one of the United States' third world countries. It was, for a long time, the land of escape, of easy divorce and bankruptcy. It still taxes its citizens little and invests even less in its schools. It took awhile for us to decide to move. But when the neighbor killed his wife, cut her up into little pieces, and stuck her in the freezer, I was shocked. When what appeared to be the same freezer that showed up in front of the house during the pre-house sale yard auction, we moved to Des Moines.

In Sanford clustered the intergenerational poor, the sometimes working poor, the ones Florida and the nation have said will always be with us. Every state has them, but Sanford had lots of them. With insufficient employment and economic opportunity, competition could take the form of racial tension. Combine that with readily available handguns, and gun laws that strive to even the odds between the threatened and those perceived as threats - perception being reality, don't you know? - and the combination is deadly.

Public consensus blames the shooter, George Zimmerman, and I do to this extent: I don't keep a handgun in my home because I fear what I would do if feeling threatened or angry. I don't walk the streets looking for suspicious people in hoodies. I don't live in a town where racial differences alone constitute a justification for aggression. I don't live in a state where politicians advocate for loose gun laws for the sake of political advantage (hey - come to think of it . . . ). Quiet voices on the margins admit that they wonder how they would have acted if they had been in the place of the shooter. And why would they be in the place of the shooter?

But the issue is larger than Trawon Martin and George Zimmerman or us. Reality never comes as discrete, isolated  persons in a vacuum or even as two separate individuals in a chance encounter. Yes, someone pulled the trigger: This is inescapable. But confining blame to these two lost souls can be distracting. Relationships are amazingly tangled, and these awful circumstances were fraught with complexity:  between the two tragic characters, one black and one Latino; their neighbors; their police force; their community; the state of Florida; national racial and economic politics; and the history and current circumstances of all of us. Neither Trawon Martin nor George Zimmerman will ever receive justice. The rest of us still have a chance for it: We have another day to figure out how to get it.

    Mercedes-Benz has come out with an invisible car - at least almost so. A camera on one side broadcasts pictures to LED panels on the other side. So as the car passes, the scene that normally would be blocked by the car appears on the car's side to be observed by passerbys. The news commentator describing the action noted the obvious: Mercedes typically doesn't build cars for the purpose of making them disappear. They get noticed.  

   People are quite different. It is amazing how completely invisible they can be. It is only when they disappear that they come to our attention. One of the great tragedies of the recent storms was a baby picked up a by a tornado and deposited in a field. Angel's parents and siblings had been killed when the tornado struck their mobile home. For a time she became a symbol of hope for victims and helpers alike. Now she has died, and she has a become a different symbol: of hopes dashed in the face of relentless nature. Of course, this is temporary: We will soon forget her completely. 

    Had there been no tornado, it is doubtful we would have heard of baby Angel at all. She might have grown up and grown old, and remained anonymous to most of us: anonymous like most people are to us, who are invisible to us. We see around and through them, and they do the same to us. Even in the church, where we are designed to be person to person, face to face, epiphanies to one another, it is hard to get people to take the time to really see each other. If they do see, they see people they know. They do not see Angel on the margins, the stranger near the back or beside the windows' glare, or in the corner. Funny how tornados and death can find and reveal people to us that we typically would overlook. Not so funny, actually.