Elijah Anderson, in his long-term ethnographic study of the Philadelphia poor, black community, says that the mugging or "stickup" event has a logic to it. Getting the attacker-- and especially the victim--through the stickup event safely depends in large measure on both actors' ability to play their parts correctly. A mishap can be deadly. /snipped
I agree that there is a logic to a mugging. I was once mugged at the Astor Street Station in NYC because I was stupid enough to walk to the very end of the platform which was completely isolated from the people at the other end of the platform. When a disheveled man stepped out from behind a pillar waving a broken bottle at me and asked me for my purse, I gave it to him. After he took it, I did not invite him to have dinner with me. I did not offer him my coat. I considered myself lucky not to be cut and vowed never to put myself in that situation again.
In that situation, I correctly played my part, and my assailant played his.
Here's another scenario. This took place during the late 80's. I m on the train with my ex-husband early New Year's Eve day. He is a musician and he is carrying his charengo (a South American stringed instrument made from an armadillo shell) in a hard instrument case. At about 2:00 A.M. a group of adolescents accompanied by a child of about eight enter the car we are in, single out a slightly built man and rob him. He is totally terrified, and no one in the car does anything.
After they rob and rough him up a little, they continue to walk through the car with one young man lagging behind. I say to him, "Why are you with them? "Don't you know what you're doing is wrong?" He answers, "Yes, I know. I'm with them, but I'm not with them. Do you know what I mean?"
I say, "Yes."
Then one of the rest of the group sees us talking and the group comes back. They start making remarks about me, my race, my mother,my looks etc. They also look at my husband sitting next to me. His face is expressionless, but he has a firm grasp on the neck of the charango case. His other hand is in his pocket. They can't figure out if he's with me or not. We are not the same race, and he is doing nothing to defend me. But there is something about his posture that makes them back off. They try to figure it out. "Is he with that "b...." "Is he?" Finally they decide to leave me alone, and walk off.
I think that my ex's silence was more powerful than any action he would have made to defend me. They couldn't figure out what he would do,(Did he have a gun in his pocket?) and even though he was outnumbered, his silence and body language made them nervous.and they decided it wasn't worth it and they left me alone. In other words, they were uncertain about how their script, (Let's go rob and hurt people on New Year's and get away with it.) would work out. The script had changed; they couldn't predict the outcome ,and they backed off.
I also learned one thing: One of the kids did not want to be there.
Here's a third incident which happened right before I retired from teaching.
I had been out on disability leave, and when I returned the sub reported that all the classes were basically okay, but there was one that was really awful.
He was right. When I walked in half of them were in the hall, two were playing cards, everyone was talking. Many were out of their seats walking around the classroom. It was as though I weren't there.
I told the two boys who were playing cards to put the cards away. They didn't, so I told them that tomorrow there would be no card playing in the class. They didn't even look up.
The next day, they were playing cards. I told them to put their cards away. When they didn't, I walked over to their desk and knocked the cards to the floor.
That got everyone's attention. One of the young men got up. His hands were clenched and a muscle was twitching in his jaw. We stared at each other. I was gambling that my departure from my teacher script would have thrown him so off balance that he wouldn't hit me, but of course anything could have happened.
Suddenly he walked to the front of the room, swept everything that was on my desk to the floor, stormed out of the door, and slammed it behind him.
Then the young man whom he had been playing cards with bent down to pick up the cards and lost face with the rest of the class. Realizing this, he too walked to my desk and threw the cards on it, and then he too walked out the door slamming it behind him.
I said to the now silent class, "There is no card playing in my class." Then I did a really stupid thing - I turned my back to the class, to write something on the board, and someone threw a boot that was one of a pair of boots that I had found that morning in the classroom and put on a table in the front for the owner to reclaim at my head.
The first I knew of it was when it bounced off the board. I turned around, and every single eye in the class was watching me to see what I would do.
"Give me the boot," I said. Someone gave me the boot, and I threw it in the garbage.
Now give me the other boot. Someone gave me that boot too, and I threw it in the garbage.
Then I picked up one of the cards that had been thrown on my desk and ripped it up. I said,
"There is no card playing in my class". Mercifully, the bell rang at that moment.
The next day when I came to my room, the kids were outside talking about what had happened in class yesterday. When they came in, one of the kids raised his hand and said,
"I heard you were almost hit in the eye yesterday."
"Yes", I said, "but I wasn't."
{quote]Getting the attacker-- and especially the victim--through the stickup event safely depends in large measure on both actors' ability to play their parts correctly. A mishap can be deadly. /snipped{/quote}
I disagree.
If you are attacked by a psychopath, THERE ARE NO RULES Again, let me say this clearly: If you are attacked by a psychopath, there are no rules. It's all improvisation. And here is a corrolary to the rule, "If you are in a psychopathic situation, there are no rules. Your survival depends on your knowledge of the situation and your ability to improvise.
When the boot hit the side of the board, I knew that I wasn't dealing with psychopaths, but I knew that I was dealing with a psychopathic situation. If the kid who had thrown the boot had wanted to hit me, he wouldn't have missed. There were thirty kids in that class. If they had wanted to, they could have ripped me apart.
To get back to the original story, the social worker's response to the robbery was not part of the script. The kid was totally unbalanced by the whole event. In terms of the Work, he delivered a shock that took the kid out of the STS paradigm that had been programmed into him.
I've read a lot of articles and responses on this site lamenting the fact that people are not resisting the PTB and therefore given permission for the pathocracy to take root.
Well there is the microcosm and the macrosm. There is the question of scale. I did what I could in my little world to create order. I took a big risk and I could have been seriously hurt. But no one else was going to do it for me, and if I had let the situation continue, someone may, in the long run, been seriously bullied or hurt in my classroom.
When people are talking about howthe social worker's story might encourage people to take risks, well yes, that's exactly the point. When you stand up to evil you don't know how it will turn out. You very well might get hurt, or killed. Or you might effect a change.
You might also learn that the people who are acting in a pathological manner are following a pathological script that they want to be released from.
No one is saying that this is easy. I'm saying that it isn't. It's scary. But if people can't take a stand in their own little piece of the planet, how is anything ever going to change?
After that incident, the class was still a bad class, but no one ever played cards in there again.
I was able to teach for sometimes 15 minutes at a time. Very few kids were in the halls.
A few weeks later when the new semester began, I had several students in my new class who had been in the old one. When they came in one of them said, "Okay Miss, I'll let you teach me this time."
It was my best class that semester.
