Fighting backFighting comes quite naturally to kids, although fighting well may take a little instruction.
My “old man” did a little boxing while serving with the North Nova Scotia Highlanders. He was normally an easy going type of guy, who could usually see the humour in situations that really weren’t all that funny.
Like the night I went with a couple of friends to a dance at the Odd Fellows Hall. Before heading out, we’d pooled our financial resources to invest in a bottle of port wine, 999 or some such, from the local bootleggers. Inexperienced drinkers, we consumed the contents of our acqiusition down by the towm dump. Quickly. I was still drunk when I got home.
With Dad sitting beside the front door, the mission was to get past him without staggering or giving him any indication that I’d been drinking. I was smiling as I walked into the kitchen, having said hello to my parents; pleased that I had made my way through the living room without giving them any hint that I was slightly inebriated.
That’s when I ran into the rinky-dink little refridgerator that had replaced our rinky-dink little ice box, and went ass over tea-kettle. I expected a somewhat more violent reaction than the suppressed giggles coming from the front room.
I should note that my father was not normally a violent person. Ma was the one who usually got upset when one or another of us came home with a black eye or a split lip. Dad was usually unperturbed by such things, as long as you were still mobile. That is to say, if you walked through the door under your own steam rather than having someone carry you in on a stretcher, he figured everything was alright.
He didn’t seem to care who had won or lost. He wanted to know if you were hurt (bloody noses, black eyes and bruises didn’t count), if you had stood your ground and whether or not you got a few licks in. Unfortunately, standing your ground often led to black eyes, bloody noses and a considerable amount of bruising.
My old man saw no percentage in talking to a bully’s parents and maybe getting into an altercation of his own. So he chose to handle matters more indirectly.
Like the time I came home with a black eye, a dented nose and no bruised knuckles. The old man came home from his job at the Naval Base, a few days later, with two pairs of boxing gloves. Not those compact little eight ounce jobs used by Marciano and Joe Louis. No. No. These were the big 16 ounce “training” models. Extra padding so you didn’t get hurt. Yeah. Like you could use a mattress to cushion the fall from a ten storey building.
But I learned to box a little, although it was a matter of survival just surviving the boxing lessons.
You’ve got to learn to defend yourself. Thump. Keep your hands up and your elbows tight to the chest. Thump. Da, I’m getting a headache. Thump. It’s for your own good. Thump. Thump. Hey Da, how about we skip the boxing lesson to-day and I go take on the grade seven class from the catholic school. Thump.
All kinds of bullies
The school yard isn’t the only place you’ll find bullies. Bullying is a fact of life; and you’ll have to be prepared to fight back. One of the new bullies on the block is the non-smokers rights groups and the tobacco prohibitionists. These clowns have declared open season on smokers.
They are not content, nor will they ever be, with simple public smoking bans. Recently, they have advocated firing smokers from their jobs, denying smokers rental accomodation, declaring smoking parents “child abusers”, and a host of other initiatives designed to force smokers to butt out and kiss their collective ass.
Learning to box won’t help you.
The way to fight back is to arm yourself with information. Challenge the bullies to prove their outrageous claims about secondhand smoke with honest scientific evidence. Don’t ignore the discrimination and intolerance directed at smokers. You might be the next target on the bullies list.
Check out my new blog: Fight Anti Smoker Tyranny
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