It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a great feeling when someone I know says he remembers the people I wrote about in a previous column.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153You know this \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcSopandas\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 guy you mentioned? Well, he was my neighbor,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a childhood friend told me recently.<\/p>\n
Indeed it is great for my column to have jogged a memory or two. But along with that is the inevitable question (often from a sibling, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Are you sure we grew up in the same household\u00e2\u20ac\u009d). Somehow I believe I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m blessed with a keen memory of childhood events, thus my pre-occupation with things I did or were done to me in the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc40s and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc50s.<\/p>\n
And there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s often a difference of opinion. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure this has happened in many families, where one family member retells a humorous incident of yesteryear. But in doing so, she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s changed the names of the characters: Instead of Mom it was Dad; instead of Immaculate Conception School it was Vegas High or Town High.<\/p>\n
Short of DNA evidence and film-type documentation, or the sworn testimony of six nuns, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard to prove very much. Who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s to say my recollection of things isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t as great as yours?<\/p>\n
In a Work of Art in 2003 I wrote about the recreational fighting that took place out of teacher sight, on the I.C. playground. Now, we must have been influenced by a code of conduct prescribed by watching westerns at the Serf. In those cowboy flicks, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry never hit a man who was down.<\/p>\n
Rather, the protagonist punched the guy hard enough to knock him down, but would lift him up again (usually by the front of the shirt) and enter Stage II, while the victim was up. Then he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d repeat steps one and two.<\/p>\n
Well, my recollection is that in our fisticuffs, we did similar things. We had it ingrained in us that 1) we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not to pick fights in the first place, but 2) if a fight is inevitable, we must 3) never hit someone when he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s down.<\/p>\n
But that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not such a novel idea. Polonius, in Shakespeare\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Hamlet, gave the same advice to his departing son Laertes, in the 1500s: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, \/ Bear\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that the opposed may beware of thee.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
So, Polonius\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 assault having been disposed of, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s set up the ring:<\/p>\n
Most fights I witnessed were arranged by mutual agreement. One pushes the other, the pushee pushes back, and fists fly. Immediately, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a circle through which not even Tiny Tim can enter, as boys cheer on the combatants.<\/p>\n
As for the honor code, on several occasions one of the observers \u00e2\u20ac\u201d usually a bigger, older neighborhood youth \u00e2\u20ac\u201d actually jumped in to yank a fighter by the ankle to keep him from striking the other boy, who was on the bottom. And sometimes, when there appeared to be an obvious mismatch, neighborhood boys would pull the enemies apart, hoping to avert a fight altogether.<\/p>\n
I was never aware of anyone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s jumping in to help his friend, or of a fight otherwise escalating into a brawl.<\/p>\n
Has anything changed? Yes. It seems the old custom of using only one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fists (no biting, no kicking) is passe. Now, judging from some of the Internet filmings of schoolyard fights, several people will attack one, being sure to land a few kicks in the ribs to the one who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s down.<\/p>\n
Well, this account wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t intended to give the finer points of fist fights but merely to speculate on change over the last 50 or 60 years. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve written several times about having Plan B, all the way to Plan Z, which I employed just to walk the seven blocks to school. The various routes were my attempt to avoid the house of Gibber or Roy or whoever else might lie in wait and weight.<\/p>\n
But even so, a bloody nose sufficed. Sure I was bullied by bigger, more experienced neighbors, but nobody I knew of carried a knife or a gun. In discussions with my three sons, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve told them about the old fear of crossing the Old Town bridge (Joe Lucero, an employee of West Schools once told me his parents used to warn him not to cross over to the east side, lest he get attacked).<\/p>\n
My sons, ranging in age from 33 to 42, insist that all their lives, they haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t known a Vegas neighborhood they fear entering on foot. In my youth, there were several, but in those days, most interactions were one on one, not 12 on one.<\/p>\n
I abhor violence, and have always tried to keep the testosterone from raging. But what lesson do we pass on to kids and popular culture magnifies and glorifies it?<\/p>\n
Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an example:<\/p>\n
Between timeouts of a football game Sunday, there was a promo commercial for My 50 TV. It opened with Danny DeVito in bed swinging a large table lamp across the room; some other male joins in to crash his guitar into a huge flat screen TV (meanwhile, the ersatz laugh-track audience is cracking up). But wait, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more:<\/p>\n
There are a couple more chair and table smashings, a kicked chair, a woman punching a hole in a wall with her fist, a man playing basketball and elbowing his female competitor in the nose. A woman who loses her cool pummels a man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s head some 20 times, and the grand finale: a creature dressed in green kicks a man in the groin with so much force that it elevates the victim.<\/p>\n
What fun they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re having!<\/p>\n
Understand, please, that these are seen by some as funny events. The half dozen acts of violence, compressed into a very short time, fail to include anything non-violent.<\/p>\n
Ain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t progress wonderful? Is that what televiewers demand? I think I prefer the olden days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a great feeling when someone I know says he remembers the people I wrote about in a previous column. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You know this \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcSopandas\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 guy you mentioned? Well, he was my neighbor,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a childhood friend told me recently. Indeed it is great for my column to have jogged a memory or two. But along with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=842"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":844,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842\/revisions\/844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}