More About Safety
This is what I mean about people wanting to feel safe vs. people taking responsibility for themselves.
This is an encounter someone had about twenty years ago with my Aunt Jessie. Aunt Jessie was my grandmother’s aunt. She lived to be about 96. She wasn’t a very tall lady. She was about 4′9″but wherever she was she commanded respect, as one should having logged that many years. When I knew her she lived in Houston. She died in the summer of 1989 and was still active up until a few months before her death.
A couple of years earlier she was out painting her house, which was no small feat for a nonagenarian. There were some kids in the alley, and from where she was they probably sounded like they were playing. That was until one climbed the fence and came at her with a stick. He swung the stick down to hit her and it broke across her shoulder. Now Aunt Jessie had dipped snuff out of steel-lid jars and chewed plug tobacco since before WWI. All those years had made her teeth just a little bit brown. She stood her ground, glared at this kid, and through clenched brownish teeth said, “You little son of a bitch!”
“…and child, his little ass flew!” was how she described it to my mom. She didn’t see anything after that but elbows and heels as that little bastard made his way back up over the fence into the alley.
She stood her ground against a coward…a coward who had nothing other than perhaps his stature backing him up. I don’t know whether or not she felt “safe.” I only know she was dealing with a bully and wasn’t having any of his sh*t. Whether he could have beat her up or not doesn’t matter. A person standing their ground with nothing but bare hands can strike fear into hearts. This isn’t about arming or not arming oneself with guns or knives or whatever. It’s about power. The only power this child had over my aunt was a perception of power he was expecting her to give him. She didn’t.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 21:48 and is filed under RogueSun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
