Devil Town: Tuesday Open Thread

And all my friends were vampires

Didn’t know they were vampires

Turns out I was a vampire myself

In the Devil Town

-Devil Town by Daniel Johnston

Strange days at the Mayhem household. My son, the Deacon, was involved in two incidents at school last week where another kid hit him. The first involved a couple kids making fun of Deac and one hitting him in the face. Deac then charged that kid and chased him halfway across the playground.

School did everything right- the teacher dressed down the offenders for being complete assholes  Deac wasn’t in trouble, and he was fine in his neurospicy way- they were Bad Guys, he scared them off, they got in trouble. Transaction settled.

Two days later, the puncher (“Asshat”) decides to start some shit again. This time, the other kids told Asshat to stop, this was wrong, this isn’t who we are, etc. Kudos to anti-bullying training- it seems to be effective at the kindergarten level at least. Well Asshat doesn’t like that, so he punches Deac in the face again. Deac, to his credit, got his hands up and covered himself instead of retaliating, at which point the recess monitor finally got over there while the classmates checked on Deac.

Again, Deac doesn’t seem to take this personally. Asshat is a Bad Guy, and this kind of shit is what Bad Guys do. He appreciated that his friends stuck up for him, and one apologized for being a dick the couple days before.

School took some additional actions, I shared some background on Asshat’s family life that I turned up through Facebook, and it looks like things are actually ok.

I know this shit happens, and that the Deacon upheld the family honor in the best way possible without becoming the aggressor himself. But I don’t know how to counsel him in a way that doesn’t sound like a fucking After School Special.

I have no frame of reference. I was never really bullied as a kid. I took pains to be as invisible as possible, because I knew I was the “weird kid” and would be marked out.

I’ve never been hit by a peer in anger- the one “fight” I’ve been in was as a law student, and that was just avoiding a drunk asshole’s swing and tossing him across the bar after he got handsy with a friend of mine. Not even a proper fight.

I know the liberal parenting tradition says “violence never solves anything.” I’m also a history major who knows this is one of the Great Lies that well-meaning people tell themselves. Norms never stopped a bullet, and we are watching the effects of what happens when one group of people has a willingness to use naked power and another group is unwilling to defend itself and its constituents. You have to be willing to fight sometimes, and we cannot raise our kids to believe otherwise.

But it’s also incredibly difficult for a young kid to exercise considered, rational judgment in the middle of a confrontation. Hell, that’s tough for grown-ups; see Tyson, Michael: “Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time.”

So here I am. Trying to teach the concept of appropriate and proportional response to a kid who regularly forgets to raise the toilet seat when he’s peeing. In a country whose top officials’ mindsets are stuck on Big Explosions Equal Big Penises.

I feel like maybe those pre-natal parenting classes could have spent a little less time on how to swaddle a newborn and more on this shit.

SPORTS:

There is only one sport right now. One series. One game. Those Goddamned pseudoFrench-speaking, pâté chinois-eating fucknuggets are trying to cheat the Most Glorious Ice Bills out of their rightful Stanley Cup destiny.

Pray for Montreal. Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen is going to steal their souls.