From my journal:<\/p>\n
Sunday, March 2, 2003\u00a0 10:23pm<\/strong><\/p>\n My kids are hell-bent on retalliation.\u00a0 Two wrongs, in their minds, definitely make a right.\u00a0 If they are hit, they have to hit back.\u00a0 If someone kicks them, that person will be kicked.\u00a0 If their mother is disrespected, the disrespecter\u2019s mother will be verbally violated.<\/p>\n I was in the middle of the literacy Thursday morning, when someone cried out about an injustice that had been done to them.\u00a0 The other party mentioned that it had been started by the first.\u00a0 So I stopped the lesson, as I am wont to do, and told a story.<\/p>\n That morning, as fate would have it, I got on the late bus (6:57), so it was crowded.\u00a0 I found an inward-facing seat near the back.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Well, someone was sitting in each of the end seats, and a construction worker (I\u2019ll call him Man #1),\u00a0 sitting in the middle one (the two seats on either side of him left empty).\u00a0 A guy (Man #2) squeezed to the back and politely said, \u201cExcuse me\u201d, and directed himself for one of the empty seats.\u00a0 Man #1, at that point, exhaled in obvious exasperation, thinking this may ward the guy off.\u00a0 But Man #2 continued to move toward the seat, and Man #1 said loudly, \u201cI\u2019m not going to move onto the middle for you!\u201d (referring to having to straddle the bump between the other empty seat and his own).<\/p>\n At this point in the story, I asked my kids what they wanted to do when people were nasty like that.\u00a0 They were all like, \u201cHit him!\u201d…\u201dBeat him up!\u201d\u00a0 I said, \u201cWell, I usually FEEL like hitting the person, but generally I\u2019m just nasty back to them.\u201d<\/p>\n Anyhow, Man #2 said nothing, didn\u2019t even make a face–he simply reached down on the floor and picked up Man #1\u2019s glove that he\u2019d dropped.\u00a0 You could see a look of \u201cI\u2019m-such-a-dick\u201d flash over the guy\u2019s face, and he muttered, \u201cThank you\u201d.<\/p>\n I told the kids, \u201cIn that moment, when that guy had the opportunity to be nasty or retalliate and he chose to be kind, HE WON.\u201d\u00a0 Of course, Man #1 was so dead-set on being right that his humility quickly left him, and he spat, \u201cWhere\u2019s my other glove?!\u201d\u00a0 Sure enough, Man #2 leaned down and plucked it off the floor and handed it to him.\u00a0 Man #1 continued to make remarks (e.g. \u201cNext week, they\u2019re gonna want to be sitting on your lap!\u201d) until he got off the bus, but Man #2 just read his paper.<\/p>\n Later on in the afternoon, after I\u2019d told this story, Shaneequa ran up to me and said, \u201cMs. Scott!\u00a0 Shanice just walked by my chair and bumped it really hard on purpose!\u201d, acting out the offense for emphasis.\u00a0 I just looked at her and said, \u201cShaneequa, be the guy who picked up the gloves.\u201d\u00a0 She paused, nodded, and walked away.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From my journal: Sunday, March 2, 2003\u00a0 10:23pm My kids are hell-bent on retalliation.\u00a0 Two wrongs, in their minds, definitely make a right.\u00a0 If they are hit, they have to hit back.\u00a0 If someone kicks them, that person will be kicked.\u00a0 If their mother is disrespected, the disrespecter\u2019s mother will be verbally violated. I was … Continue reading Retalliation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":468,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions\/468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}