Three Punks of Yore

It's been a tough political cycle with no end in sight.  Everyone who faces opposition puts on their armor, bears a grudge.  We saw mobs descend on the opposition's vehicles and attempt intimidation with a real or at least credible threat of violence.  One of my most respected authors, a journalist by profession, Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press issued an editorial on election day that came to my local newspaper post-election day, pre Presidential determination, that the results don't matter if the behavior remains static.  https://www.freep.com/story/sports/columnists/mitch-albom/2020/11/01/mitch-albom-2020-presidential-election/6102179002/

As I looked at hoodlums in the making, I thought back to the punks of my own teen years coming up with three who literally attacked me, something of a nebbish that perfect target that any worthy predator could pounce.  None got reported though one would have been had I needed medical care for the three fingers he hyperextended.  I let the torn shirt go.  Generally reporting as a victim made you an easy target.  We have that today when women in our Orthodox communities seek their Rebbe's guidance on spousal abuse.  Usual question, what did you do to provoke him?  No, in the absence of needing medical care, none got reported.

It's now more than a half century later, more than ample time to assess outcome.  Mine has been pretty good, stable career, nimble mind, stable family, nachas from children.  As I drove around Trump Country on two day trips pre-election, looking at the election signs on the lawns and farms, it was obvious that my personal and usually financial assets exceeded theirs.  Any good Social Darwinist can make that assessment.

I didn't know how the three teens, two classmates, one from an organization, who actually attacked me fared.  One seemed superficially respectable, the other two had their daily attendance taken in the principal's office instead of the homeroom.

Those same fifty years allowed electronic retrieval systems and cataloguing people, mostly for free and usually with little effort.  None of the three had ultra-common names so name and estimated age made identification easy.  Two of the three had obits, one more a death notice with burial site. 

The first actually made a friendly overture to me later. He had some psychological problems but it would take me through my medical school psychiatry rotation to be able to define people like that with better specificity than just not right.  He physically harmed me but was physically and to a lesser extent verbally aggressive in our encounters.  He was about my weight, muscular, pinning me faster than a prom queen in a legitimate gym class wrestling module.  But he was volatile.  He lived to his mid-40's, lies for eternity at a veteran's cemetery in California with a notation that he served during the Vietnam conflict.  There are no notations of what he achieved or cause of death at a young age.  I also came across a far more detailed obit of his mother who lived to age 97.  She sounded like a sweetie.  Her son was named as pre-deceasing her.  She had several children and worked as a waitress at a time when mothers tended to stay home or do teaching or nursing.  I suspect that finances may have been strained.  This son must have been a handful in the days before the principals or deans of discipline could set their phones to speed dial selected parents.

Second person from school is still alive.  He is identified by Google searches which lead to directories rather than individual entries that mark his achievements in business or identify him as a property owner or even a linkedin occupational entry.  He has lived in a lot of places, none for very long.  And he does not seem to settle in major population centers. I did not check any of the geographic identifications to see which have a correctional center.  Of note, when the search scans for court contacts, they identify that there are 19 records.  Were I willing to pay a fee the search site would identify them, but I had no inclination to spend money on this.  I would be a little critical of our HS Reunion 50 year committee for not taking the initiative to pursue his whereabouts and contact, along with most others whose location capture would not come passively.  If they are alive, they probably had some relations more endearing than the one with me.  I never wore the torn shirt again.  My mother never asked how it got torn.  And within two days I had full recovery of range of motion to the hyperextended fingers without needing xray, immobilization, or analgesics.  There was something wrong with him, but even as an alumnus of our psychiatry course, I cannot identify what.

Our final acquaintance was a hellion, a generally hostile person who strived for dominance but lacked the social skills to gain acceptance voluntarily.  Hostility to me was pretty much every encounter, laying of the hands only twice that I remember, at least one provoked .  By age 15 he was already a smoker, either a quest for attention or social acceptance in those days, but at age 15 still a measure of deviance.  Since we went to different schools, my summer with him ended, but I remembered his name and what he did to me indefinitely.  He didn't have a terrible outcome.  Eventually he married in his hometown of Suffern.  He had served in the military and had a stable family.  He also had an identifiable occupation.  Settling in Pennsylvania, one of the parts that doesn't vote like me, he worked in quarries as the guy who hosed down the fiery rocks, which I assume is part of the extraction process.  He lived to his early 60's, wife predeceasing him by a few years, and with children survivors.  Certainly within the mainstream at the end, though a troubled beginning.  The Army still has a way of making people responsible.  We read about veterans who remain aimless after their service, but this fellow of unstable and volatile underpinnings seemed to have lived a mainstream adult life.  

In the fifty or so years since they threatened or in one case physically harmed me, I did not think about them but never forgot their names.  As I see their next generation banding together to intimidate, I am grateful that these three acted mostly alone, I think, to identify a vulnerable target, maybe many, though not as a mob.  Today, would I report it?  Victims of bullying are treated more sympathetically now and the bullies are offered assessment in addition to punishment, so probably yes.  As an experienced physician, I regret not having my hand x rayed, though it would not have shown a fracture.  A medical exam might generate an MRI with identification of injury.  Had it not been self-limited over a few days, medical care and report of an attack would have been mandatory.  Do I hold any personal animosity? No.  Do I gloat in any way that my outcome surpassed theirs?  No, I would have expected that.

But the punks now are more threatening than these three turned out to be.  And my prediction for their long term underperformance runs parallel to the three outcomes Google searches have revealed for me.