“You mean… They were having
an argument, right?” my dad said. “Not REAL fighting, right?”
I rolled my eyes at him but
the next words out of my mother’s mouth made me snap to attention.
“Here, I’ll tell you what you
need to do if someone tries to fight you,” she said. Um, okay. Her totally
EXPERT advice is as follows:
“The thing that you should
always do is DE-ESCALATE.”
This seems like a good thing
to do, right? Well, not this kind of “de-escalation”. So, let’s set the scene,
shall we?
A girl comes up to you. She
is angry with you for stealing something important to her (her
boyfriend/girlfriend/biology paper/cat). She swings back and hits you hard in
the side of the jaw. FREEZE! What do you do? Three
options…
- You run away screaming, looking for an authority figure or a strong, physically intimidating friend;
- You curl in to the fetal position and cry, “Please don’t hurt me!”
- You de-escalate. By hitting her back TWICE AS HARD.
Okay, I support defending
yourself and stuff like that, but this is NOT de-escalation, people!
I tried to explain to my mom
that to normal people, de-escalating is making the situation calmer and less
angry. She would have none of it. My mom tried to explain. “Once
you punch them back twice as hard, the person you’re fighting with won’t want
to hit you again because they know you mean business.” I pointed out that this
could just make the person who wants to fight you angry or angrier.
Another one of my mom’s tips
that had pretty much the same basic idea was GO ISRAELI ON THEIR ASS! Yes, this
has to be shouted. This one confused me a bit until I asked her to explain. She
said, “If a Palestinian soldier threw a rock and broke an Israeli soldier’s
arm, the Israelis would take a tank and run over seventeen Palestinian civilians.”
After it was explained to me,
I asked my mom to stop saying it. She refused. It has become one of her
favorite expressions, along with “Jesus Christ on a crutch!” and “Tough titty said
the kitty when the milk ran dry.” She likes to direct both sayings towards me.
I hope you find the last one as horrifying as I do.
All my mom’s tips boil down
to the idea that if someone hits you, you hit them back twice as hard. I told
this to my guidance counselor once, and then he thought I was weird. What isn’t
better than creeping out your guidance counselor? I DON’T KNOW.
So, if you get into a fight,
call my mom. She will have some AWESOME tips for you on how to de-escalate and
be vaguely politically incorrect! Remember, hit them back TWICE AS HARD.
