Defending Civility

I am coaching my son's basketball team at a tournament in Toronto.  My wife is going to come to the second game and bring our daughter, to watch our suburban team take on one of the best teams in Ontario. She calls me, asking for directions to the school and I go out into the parking lot of the school to get better reception and give her better directions.

I'm distracted by the phone, the upcoming game and as I look around the parking lot, it seems I have stumbled into a fight.

Now, I'm from Oshawa.  Fights in Oshawa were fights, you know.  There was no rolling around on top of each other with somebody's friends piling on and out manning some poor kid. The fights in the suburban school I teach in had always been little more than slap-fests with someone vowing to get their Mom to call the school.  Fights in Oshawa were generally, one on one and usually ended with someone either capitulating or being knocked unconscious.  The fight I stumbled into was an Oshawa style fight. Except for the bystanders.  Many of them weren't kids, many of them were adults, maybe even parents of the two kids fighting.

Well, I'm in it now aren't I.  I close my flip phone, use my teacher voice to tell the kids to stop fighting.  No effect.  When I say they were kids, I mean they were teenagers but each was well over 6' tall.  I yell again. No response.  Finally, I wade into the fight, grab one fellow by the ear (I don't know where that came from) and the other fellow by the scruff of the neck. Now, as many of you know, I am a powerful 5'7" but even at that great stature, I had both my arms well above my head and the two combatants were now hunched over like church ushers.

I am yelling "stop, you stop" and then I look at the crowd that has now assembled in the parking lot and I start yelling at them; "you should be ashamed of yourselves, you're an embarrassment."  I take the two kids into the school, noticing that they both have the same basketball jackets on and deliver them to their coach.

Months later I am telling this story to a group and after I tell it, one person comes up to me and tells me she's a cop in that area and that what I did was foolish.  I could have been killed she tells me.  She tells me, in that area of Toronto, they don't get out of the cruiser unless there are at least two other cruisers there.

It is a story I tell with some hesitation because of the ability of stories to build myth.  I am asked to tell it a few times a year and I always do so with some trepidation as to not sound boastful or heroic in any way. I tell it to you now because we live in dangerous times .

Maybe I was foolish.  Maybe I was lucky and I certainly wouldn't recommend others take a similar risk but the world has changed.  Maybe the civility we inherited and have been expected to maintain, has taken a hit or two.  Whether it is in a parking lot, or in a plane, at a dinner table or on social media we have to confront boorishness and in order to protect civility, the "snowflakes" as we are sometimes called, might have to bend an ear or two.