Well, going by the huge number of movies where the bad guy gets blown to pieces, fired out of the airlock, or plummets off a building to their doom like the lead bad guy at the end of "Die Hard", we have an appetite for a wrongdoer receiving some kind of karmic retribution. Wow, what a pompous way to say we like to see a bad guy get a super-hard kick in the pants (at the very least).
So, speaking as a judgmental person who has been through a couple of situations where, had I taken the law into my own hands and administered rough justice, a percentage of the audience might have cheered, this is what I do when I start thinking about revenge scenarios. I call it "The morning after". Imagine all of the things you would do if life was a computer game, and you could do whatever you like without any chance of being held to account. Then imagine you have done them, and you are waking up the morning after. What would be better in your world as a result of your actions? Would you really feel any less wronged, any less abused, or any better about life? Or is there a possibility that you would be thinking, "I have to live with doing that crap for the rest of my life"?
Life is not a movie that we switch off after 90 minutes and move on from. Sure, there are probably very few men who have been cheated on who have not considered the merits of administering justice with an enthusiastically swung Louisville Slugger, but what would we be doing to ourselves if we actually did it? Even if we got away with something like that? Is that who we want to be?
I'll share something here. Back when I was around twenty, when my seventy year-old Dad went to take issue with our drunken neighbour about where he had parked his car, causing an obstruction, after his regular lunchtime visit to a pub, the guy - in his fifties - took issue, and slugged my Dad. My Dad's retina detached, and he lost the sight in his right eye. When my Mum and I went to visit my Dad in the hospital, and he saw us enter the ward, he started to cry. This is a man who went through World War 2, and got shot a few times. Crying after being blinded in one eye by a drunken piece of shit. I will never forget that. I can still picture it if I close my eyes and think about it, and I am 58 now.
How does a young man deal with that? I struggled like Hell with it. If life was a movie script, I should have gone next door and beaten that drunken piece of crap to death and told him that no-one hurts my Dad and gets away with it. But what stopped me was that I knew that my Dad would not have wanted that drunken piece of crap to have turned his son into a murderer. Allowing that worthless drunk to not only blind my Dad, but to turn my Dad's son into a killer would have broken my Dad's heart.
In the spirit of full disclosure, in light of what I have written here, my best friend and I did discuss 'taking care of business', because my friend loved my Dad and thought the world of him. But when all the plans and schemes had been talked through, we did nothing. Not because we were chicken shit. Not because the piece of shit would not have deserved it. Our plans went no further than the revenge fantasies of two hurt young men because we did not want a drunk piece of crap to drag us down to his level by turning us into criminals who had abandoned the very values that set us apart from him.
So my message is that if you did go and beat the living bejeesus out of the AP, what would have changed? The affair would still have happened. The AP would still be the same uncaring piece of garbage, just with a black eye, or concussion, or whatever. But what about you? Would you really want to be a guy with a temper that made him abandon his values and hammer the crap out of someone else? Or is what makes you a decent person worthy of respect the fact that unlike the AP, you have self control and an unwillingness to do harm to others through your actions?
After what I went through, I know how a man's mind works, and how we question ourselves about 'matters of honour', and whether not administering rough justice is a sign of weakness, but we also have to question what would be improved if we did administer that rough justice. The only thing it would really change is us, and not for the better. Is pounding a scumbag really worth lowering ourselves to their level? I faced that decision, I stepped back, and I do not regret it. What happened to my Dad was wrong, but nothing I did afterwards would have changed it, or made it better. Me being in jail would have just made it worse for my Dad, and I was not going to give that hateful old drunk the power to make that happen by me doing something rash.
[This message edited by M1965 at 3:39 AM, Thursday, March 28th]
