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TechnoratiA Hole in the Night
It all felt wild and uncontained, like on the playground. I was the outsider kid, wrong jacket, wrong hat. Or maybe I just stepped out of my car at the wrong time. With a whoop they were on me, surrounding me, laughing. What great fun.
Then one of them shoved me and I was off balance, stumbling, and I felt more shoves and they were saying something to me. They wanted my money, I guess. They weren't going to get it. But what fun. I remember big, white-teeth grins, laughter, especially from the kid in the white hoodie. He's the only one who looked me in the eye. He was laughing as he swung and connected with my cheekbone and I went down on a neighbor's lawn.
They were dancing. Well, not really, but there was an exuberance to their footwork as they feinted toward me, stepped back. I thought White Hoodie was going to kick me and I realized, OK, they're not going to let me get up. Even then I didn't feel scared, though I was starting to get angry. I was at the center of their fun but I wasn't having any fun. I roused myself to all fours and brayed like a goat. At least that's how I remember it, as I write these words a day later. I made a noise. It was not a dignified noise, nor was it tentative, but something abrasive and raw. I was shouting for help. I know I shouted the word at least three times.
This is how lucky I am. I wasn't walking down a deserted alley behind an abandoned warehouse at midnight. The time was only 9:15 p.m. and I was on a residential street on the North Side of Chicago and lights were on here and there and somebody could easily have heard me. The boys stopped dancing. This was no longer fun. They turned and ran and that was that. Still on hands and knees, I watched them disappear into the night.
OK, deep breath. I got up. My right cheekbone was pulsing and I rubbed it. I was three blocks from my house. I looked around and the night was silent. No one had come running. No one heard me. Yet it was over. Just yelling had been enough.
Two minutes of ruptured trust. I could still feel something deeply unpleasant in the air - could still sense the exuberance of the dancing boys, the wild playground glee of their assault. I felt shriveled and dazed, yet contained, oddly unharmed. Even the pain in my cheekbone was ebbing. My first thought was, well, that's that. Just go home. I have a loner/stoic aspect to my personality. What happens to me is private: my own business. But the night continued to rush in through the hole the boys tore in it and I knew this wasn't a private, passing event.
And then I saw a police car and before I knew it I had flagged it down. I heard myself stammer the details: "I've just been attacked." I pointed in the direction I had come from. "No, I don't think I could identify them." But then I described the kid in the white hoodie. I hopped in the car and we drove around as the police radio blared. Two female officers. Their demeanor was dead serious, but respectful . . . even kind. "I've been in Chicago 33 years," I said. They were listening. "This has never happened to me before."
No sign of the boys. They took me home. They filled out a report and printed out a copy for me. That brief, malevolent interlude now had its own case number: HR-622921. It was in the system. Did I need an ambulance? No, I said. I'd forgotten about my bashed cheek. "You should put some ice on it," one of the officers said.
Oh God. Suddenly I felt how big this all was. I groped for words. "This is so nuts," I said. "I work with restorative justice. I want these kids to have a chance, to not get sucked up in the system." The officer was still listening. She nodded her head with the same respectful seriousness.
This was someone who knew the darkness. Maybe she saw it, too. This was about more than just us vs. them and "get the punks." I entered my house. I think of her now as an angel in a bulletproof vest.
It was something big, yes, but still just at the edge of nothing. I hadn't been hurt or even robbed. So much worse happens all around me. I hadn't been shot, stabbed or walloped with a baseball bat. The next day my neighbor told me that a former high school classmate of her daughter was recently murdered. My own daughter had a classmate who was murdered several years ago. Last year, 36 Chicago school kids were homicide victims.
"This whole country is a powder keg," someone said to me the next day. "The whole world . . . the whole world's a powder keg."
And this is the thought that stays my anger, that holds my revenge fantasies in check. How have we managed to learn so little over the past 10 millennia of civilized violence, except how to do it on an industrial scale? We're still in the kneejerk phase of human evolution, still clueless about the nature of power unless it goes bang.
Real power occurs in silence: the silence of reaching out, listening, understanding. And as I talk to people about my encounter, as the flow of love begins to heal the emotional rift, I feel silent determination grow inside me to stay the course of peace.
31 Comments so far
Show AllI believe that helping other people is one of good character that a person must possess.
London Hypnotherapist
I was mugged once...way back in the Middle of winter on one of the more "dangerous streets" in Edmonton. IT was while I was going to a Technical school and after coming back from some house party. I had decided to walk home because I had about 2 bucks left to me and could not afford a bus.
An aboriginal man and women coming from the other way. As I pass the woman grabs me, the guy pulls out this knife and holds it to my neck asking for my money.
Still drunk I am in a rather good mood. I banter with them as I hand my wallet over. He sees it empty and asks what I have in my pockets. I turn them all inside out and show my last two bucks. He snorts and says keep it stares me over and then says ok give me your coat. I have this big long leather winter jacket I had bought via the Eatons Catalogue.
I hand the thing over and he puts it on and I say gee its cold I am gonna freeze to death. The women says givem him your old coat so he dont freeze.
We part and I wave to them saying see ya.
Woke up the next morn and never felt a twinge of anger. I laughed my stupidity off.
Some 10 years later I take a car into a transmission shop and the guy bills me for some 900 bucks. I found out later he never did the job he claimed he did. It was a simple known issue with these cars fixed with a 2 dollar part.
I still have anger towards THAT guy.
This article is the perfect antidote to those who would say that leftists who get mugged become right-wing.
I guess it's one reason why it's easy for me to get angry at the people who assaulted the author. I know that incidents like these make it harder for solidarity to happen. Not everyone who is a victim of a mugging is as forgiving and thoughtful as Mr. Koehler.
One way I've always tried to keep my Punisher-streak in check is by thinking about why people turn out the way they do and how our unequal society churns out thugs, be they members of gangs,the military, or law enforcement. From the homies to the rednecks, from the armed robbers to the abusive parents, capitalism makes all the low-level predators.
I'll admit it. I hate the punks, the riff-raffs, the jackals, but I hate the powerful bastards who tend the toxic gardens from which criminality springs even more.
Not Allan-"There is a saying, a Republican is a Democrat who has been mugged."
Aren't we all getting mugged?
St. Paul said something to the effect that when I am weak ,I am strong. We were made to love one another and it is in the profound silence of our own deep souls that we come to know the great strength and power of forgiveness and hear the voice of God. What a wonderful witness to truth and must read for a world that actually believes violence can bring about.....
Peace
Get some pepper spray (bear spray?), taser, cane or even an umbrella. Be aware of your surroundings and you won't become a victim.
Although I love this site, I am left feeling that when one dares to share any inkling of spirituality,of pure human connection, they are immediately criticized and belittled by the politically driven energy of of the "progressive mind machine" of some CD readers. (Mind over heart)
Two comments:
Violent crime exists in London as much as in Chicago. I work with tens of Brits who can testify as to how unsafe they feel in London.
I think Mr. Koehler deserves praise for having the guts to share his human vulnerabilities and his soul- processing of this unfortunate event.
Robert C. Kohler has successfully avoided the greatest harm that could have come to him by refusing to join in the cycle of violence either mental or physical. He joins the likes of Jesus and his true followers, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. who not only talked the talk but walked the walk in face of extreme provocations to do otherwise. King said:
"We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word"
The mocking tone of several of the commenters in this thread show how difficult this course is in the present emotional climate of our culture.
Poet
Stupid to assume that the attackers were underprivileged.
I'd bet every one of them had a cell phone and play violent computer games.
A generational war in this country wouldn't surprise me at all. At age 66 I am increasingly frightened. I was mugged several years ago and still don't know what happened except that I woke up on a blood soaked pillow with a big gash on the back of my head and someone had stolen my cane but nothing else. For what?
This article brought tears. And anger. One can devote an entire life to fighting for justice and then bang. This country is starting to piss me off!
-30-
If it makes ya feel a tad better, RK, I caught a prowler attempting to climb into a neighbor's back porch the other night...
He will not be physically capable of prowling for a while...
Funny, nobody respond to his cries for help, either...
I have to remind myself that the repercussions of social and economic policy also play out within the family.
Have you ever seen an individual in a family get scapegoated for the fears of the other family members? Not uncommon in highly competitive 'upwardly mobile' family cultures.
Not pretty, rarely detected and recognized and psychologically devastating.
More prevalent as the repression recedes and the real recession deepens; depends on "change" becoming progress by the otherwise No Account President/Party (NAPPing, at present)!
The world is not black and white, good and bad.
Of course, each person is responsible for their actions, including the one who puts his safety in jeopardy by going to a country filled with hatred (such as the two examples i gave).
This article is not about who is responsible. It is about learning to deal with the real world, and real human beings, with all their faults. It is about the inherent failings of the human species as a partly rational, partly emotional animal.
This article, at its core, is about what jesus said on the cross, and what Jesus taught during his whole time as a preacher. The cycle of hate must be broken or it will kill us all.
You are right.
who will play the Requiem of Brahms for the human race?
Much more recently, Gandhi said the same thing.
These poor kids are "victims" of the system is the cry. Its been the cry for forty plus years. Hows it working out.
Sometime you must get to the reality that kids that suffer no consequenses for their actions, that recieve no expectations and are given the built in excuse that "its not their fault" don't stop their violent actions.
We have been following this mindset for over that said forty years just as the theories in education. Does the end result of what we are producing not tell you anything? Do the actions of these kids tell you nothing?
Because faulty theories were followed, does that mean you must continue to follow them even when they prove faulty? Are Progressives so wrapped up in ideaology that they cannot change, they cannot do something different in the hope its the right thing to do?
Revenge and hate has little to do with this incident. Permisiveness and excuse making have everything to do with it.
You and people like you are the biggest victims of the system because you perpetuate the "might is right" military murders and call them patriotic duty. You will kill all of us with your ferocity.
Who knows, perhaps you are doing us all a favor. That inability to submit to anyone who isn't stronger, tougher and meaner than you is the destructive trait that humans just can't seem to shake.
Thanks for the wars. It saves the aliens the trouble of finishing us off.
Henry, I can't even work out who or what you've been listening to. Are you sure it's not just people complaining that someone else has espoused permissiveness?
In the US, we imprison more people for more time per capita than anywhere in the world. The trend has built strongly since roughly around 1980.
In California, folks passed a "three strikes" law to tie force judges to issue long jail sentences regardless of context, circumstance, and yes, any other standard of culpability besides the juries' decisions of guilt or innocence.
How's it working out?
- Well, prisons are criminally overcrowded.
- A judge has ordered prisoners released, but not enough to get CA legal.
- CA pays borrowed money to appeal to keep prisoners illegally.
Crime? Well, unless most of those convictions are false, it's still choogling along. Some of what people call crime includes California's largest cash crop.
What educational theory are you talking about, BTW? Some are better than others, and your posts don't generally read as though you were against theory itself.
If you pick a theory and a premise and check for that empirical verification, you have some ripe opportunities to surprise yourself.
What do you mean???
The modest Johnson-era measures that would have helped were all defunded and dismantled before they were even given a chance to work more than 30 years ago. For the brief period they wer in place, poverty and violent crime were declining. Economic inequality has only increased enormously since then.
Why don't European countries (and Canada) have a violent street crime problem? They don't have tough law enforcement. No death penalty. British cops don't even carry guns or tazers.
And yes, they have large racial minority populations.
They do have serious economic redistribution programs though. Also, convict rehabilitation and job programs.
I agree that law enforcement is the first thing needed in these communities; and paying for it is the hard part. It should be noted that the lion's share of law enforcement budgets in this country are used up incarcerating people for having marijuana in their possession, so the real societal 'permissiveness' that causes these crimes to slip under the law enforcement net may have more to do with conservatives than liberals.
Yes, and only those posessing marrijuana-while-black. A white person doing time for simple posession, or even dealing, is very rare - even though whites are proportiontely the greater uers.
I saw flagrantly discriminitory law enforcement every day in Pittsburgh when before my job moved to the white suburbs.
Yes I know, Post-Obama, to point out racism in our society entitles people like Henry8 to call me a racist.
I don't quite understand. Were those kids dressed up as Klanners?
A leftist, going back to Marx or earlier, views incidents like this objectively in terms of the social-political-forces that drive human behavior. They do not let emotion - especially feelings of hate which we all feel after incidents like permanantly distort our objective analysis.
This incident and Koeler's reaction reminds me a bit of Robert Fisks objective analysis of his own mugging by angry Afghanis when trying to report on the US bombing of a village. Most people understood his analysis, but in the US, he recieved largely derision.
The cause of violent incidents like this are as well established as Newtons laws. They are poverty and particularly economic inequalty. Yes, I know that most poor USAns live a lot better than a someone in the slums of Mumbai, but it is the relative iequality - the sense of unfairness, that drives the violence. In the US, it takes on an irrational individualistic form, in places like Colombia, recently in Nepal, and currently in parts of India it takes on a more rational organized political form.
The individuals who atracked Mr. Koehler are as much victims of the syatem as the Koehler was.
A voice of reason.
In reply to Not Allan, who wrote:
"There is a saying, a Republican is a Democrat who has been mugged."
I am afraid that today Republican politicians are just crooks or con-men or con-women (much like Democratic politicians but with a different bent and often a bit more extreme in terms of mendacity and corruption). Honest and well-meaning conservatives in this country could sure use a party that would be to the Republican Party what the Green Party is to the Democratic Party. And I do not mean the Libertarian Party as that is essentially an extremist party and does not claim to support positions or values similar to what the politicians in the Republican Party pretend to stand for.
Well put. We do need "Real" fiscal Conservatives to keep the country financially on course. Unfortunately they are few and far between, and when they do speak up they are marginalized and/or ignored. One example of this is David walker the FORMER US Comptroller general and his warnings about our countries future financial demise because of out of control spending.
He resigned rather suddenly a few years back. I guess he wanted off the train before it wrecks.
I am a lifelong socialist, but I am willing to listen to honest, well-educated, principled, level-headed conservatives and to weigh their arguments. However, the US Republican Party has become a joke and could be described as nothing more than a Gang Of Predatory criminals. It is not a serious organization that makes serious arguments. I suspect that the few honest and level-headed conservative politicians have been weeded out over the years, like your David Walker, and the only Republicans left are ruthless, mendacious, crooked fiends and total crackpots.
Sorry double post.
Yup, I agree completely.
Those who fan the flames of violence and hatred join a long list of people throughout history who did the same.
Hatred is an emotion, and as such is free-floating. Emotions have a life of their own independent of rational thoughts. You feel them, and then you go looking for a reason. Next time you feel sad, think of all the reasons you have to feel sad. There are tons. Don't dwell on them. Instead, think of all the reasons you have to be happy.
When hatred is promoted in any group, or mob, that mob goes looking for a person to hate. It doesn't think rationally.
In recent history, you have Rachelle Corrie and Amy Elizabeth Biehl who were killed by the violence of anger.
Rachelle Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer.
Amy Elizabeth Biehl was killed in 1993 by an angry mob in South Africa. She had been volunteering to help the people who killed her.
Hatred isn't rational, it isn't Christian. Hatred was used by Hitler to gain control of Nazi Germany. Hatred is the current weapon of choice by many right wing wackos. God help us all....
[as the flow of love begins to heal the emotional rift, I feel silent determination grow inside me to stay the course of peace.]
There is a saying, a Republican is a Democrat who has been mugged.
So, Koehler gets mugged and is still a Democrat !
And politically correct to a fault. Perhaps a fatal fault for society?
The saying is 'a republican is a democrat who has been mugged by reality'
yet all it seems to have taught republicans is to belong to a bigger gang. I prefer FDR's saying, about fear.