Ah, yes. I am reminded of my own grade school days. I was a bookish and introspective child, who caused little trouble for anyone so long as they simply left me alone.
Human nature being what it is, however, there were those kids who just didn’t want to leave kids like me alone. They
liked being bullies. For whatever reason, they just got a head trip out of being an irritating pain in the posterior.
Third grade. I was sitting in the corner of the school building off the main playground, reading a big coffee-table book. The bully decided it would be great fun to sit about ten feet away from me and chuck rocks at my face. I asked him three times to stop it. (All I wanted was to just read my book and be left alone.) But, of course, he wasn’t about to stop it; he encountered no resistance and stopping on his own would have spoiled all his fun, because it’s
fun to pick on people who don’t hit back, and merely ask you politely to please stop.
(There’s a lesson there for all our current folk who think the best way to deal with militant Islamicists is to “dialogue” with them. Anyway.)
He kept getting closer, and he kept it up. Finally I got tired of it, and I closed the book, took it in both hands, and smacked him upside the head with it as hard as I could, and I kept hitting him over the head with it until they dragged me off. I ended up in the principal’s office (not the first time, and not the last.) They called my Dad, who worked at home (not the first time, and not the last), and told him what I’d done.
Dad listened very politely to the whole story, and then told the assistant principal, “I
told him to do that.”
The A.P. said, “You told him to do what, sir?”
Dad said, “I told him that if somebody was picking on him and wouldn’t leave him alone, that he was to ask the kid to stop, and if it didn’t stop, then he was find the biggest weapon he could find to hand and attack—and continue to attack until the other kid ceases to pick on him.”
The dumbfounded A.P. stammered, “Well, sir, do you think that’s the proper way to teach your son how to deal with problems in the real world?”
And the Old Man said, “You want to know about the real world? I was dealing with the real world before you were out of short pants, buddy-boy. The way you do it in the real world is you hit the Japanese with everything you got, and you continue to hit them until they either give up or they’re all dead, because that’s the only thing they understand. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.” And he hung up. (Not the first time, and not the last.)
Dad never quite made it all the way back from the Pacific.
I was turned loose, and never heard anything about it again. I suppose they could have tried to punish me, but then they’d have had the Old Man to deal with, and they definitely didn’t want to deal with him. With three of his kids in their school, they’d dealt with him numerous times before, and always lost.
