I found a column that I wrote in the January 25th 2006 edition of the Red Deer Life. It was about an after-school scrap that I witnessed in front of the supermarket parking across from Eastview School.
The combatants were likely students at Eastview, and they were smart enough to settle their differences off school property and outside of school punishment.
They were also evenly matched in size and they fought an old-school scrap without buddies and weapons.
The fight began as a wrestling match and ended with a couple of solid punches from the victor.
I called it like this: “The whole incident took place in a hurry and the net result was one set of bruised knuckles and one bruised ego. The scrap followed age-old rules of engagement where one-on-one combat occurred between two willing opponents”.
The column then went into my philosophy that schoolyard scraps between evenly matched and well-motivated combatants are essentially a rite of passage.
“I realize that my endorsement of a punch-fest is not likely to win me votes as a progressive guy in today’s sanitized world of politically correct behavior, but schoolyard dust-ups were a rite of passage when Fred Flintstone and I went to junior high.”
I did rule out the behavior of bullies when I wrote: “However this column in no way endorses the behavior of schoolyard bullies who rarely pick on somebody their own size and eventually find that, as adults, everybody is their own size or better. Things even out for these misfits in grown-up world.”
Every kid faced a time when he had to duke it out in school, or face the consequences of life as a target when I wrote: “Anyhow, back to my 1960s world as a kid in Red Deer where Martin Luther King’s concept of passive resistance wasn’t really an option on the playground. Sometimes you had to throw a punch, win, lose or draw, and my track record involved all three of these options.”
I did qualify my fight record with the notion that “I didn’t actively seek out a scrap as a kid.”
Then I wrote: “These kind of invitations usually found you in kid world and you had to decide whether to accept the gracious offer and possibly lose the fight or decline and definitely lose status.”
I concluded the column with a notion that: “Most of us outgrow the need to throw punches and have developed the right emotional, verbal and social skills to avoid opportunities to square off as mature adults.”
It’s funny how things have changed even in four short years.
A 2010 scrap may take place in cyber-world where combatants duke it out on the Plains of Facebook and bullies ply their loathsome trade as character assassins in the same world.
That 2006 old school scrap looks even better in 2010 compared to the new cyber arena.