Retalliation

My kids are hell-bent on retalliation.  Two wrongs, in their minds, definitely make a right.  If they are hit, they have to hit back.  If someone kicks them, that person will be kicked.  If their mother is disrespected, the disrespecter’s mother will be verbally violated.

I was in the middle of the literacy Thursday morning, when someone cried out about an injustice that had been done to them.  The other party mentioned that it had been started by the first.  So I stopped the lesson, as I am wont to do, and told a story.

That morning, as fate would have it, I got on the late bus (6:57), so it was crowded.  I found an inward-facing seat near the back.  There are also those five seats that line the very back of the bus, the extreme two seats not giving you enough room to put your feet down and all of them always hot as hell from being right on top of the engine.  Well, someone was sitting in each of the end seats, and a construction worker (I’ll call him Man #1),  sitting in the middle one (the two seats on either side of him left empty).  A guy (Man #2) squeezed to the back and politely said, “Excuse me”, and directed himself for one of the empty seats.  Man #1, at that point, exhaled in obvious exasperation, thinking this may ward the guy off.  But Man #2 continued to move toward the seat, and Man #1 said loudly, “I’m not going to move onto the middle for you!” (referring to having to straddle the bump between the other empty seat and his own).

At this point in the story, I asked my kids what they wanted to do when people were nasty like that.  They were all like, “Hit him!”…”Beat him up!”  I said, “Well, I usually FEEL like hitting the person, but generally I’m just nasty back to them.”

Anyhow, Man #2 said nothing, didn’t even make a face–he simply reached down on the floor and picked up Man #1’s glove that he’d dropped.  You could see a look of “I’m-such-a-dick” flash over the guy’s face, and he muttered, “Thank you”.

I told the kids, “In that moment, when that guy had the opportunity to be nasty or retalliate and he chose to be kind, HE WON.”  Of course, Man #1 was so dead-set on being right that his humility quickly left him, and he spat, “Where’s my other glove?!”  Sure enough, Man #2 leaned down and plucked it off the floor and handed it to him.  Man #1 continued to make remarks (e.g. “Next week, they’re gonna want to be sitting on your lap!”) until he got off the bus, but Man #2 just read his paper.