Today at work, Arianne, Chris and I watched two kids we'd been bullshitting with for about an hour suddenly break into a fight and beat the shit out of each other in the street. They very nearly attacked each other with bricks, and most definitely would have if it hadn't been for two older guys wrenching them out of their hands.
Over lunch, we talked about it. The sight of one of the boys kicking the other in the head repeatedly as he lay near the curb, and the sound of their shoulders and heads cracking off the pavement as they wrestled each other was disturbing. But then one of the older guys told us that they fight like that every day. And I remembered how one of them, shocked that I'd told him I'd never been in a fight, had asked me just a few minutes before he started wailing on the other kid, "So what do you do if someone grabs your tit or rapes you?" And Chris noted how the kid he was reading the survey to wasn't phased at all by what the violence that was going on a few feet in front of him and continued answering the questions; no big deal.
I found this scene in Breakfast of Champions particularly poignant, considering the day's events:
In one of New York City's many ghettos for dark-skinned people, a group of Puerto Rican boys gathered together in the basement of an abandoned building. They were small, but they were numerous and volatile. They wished to become frightening, in order to defend themselves and their friends and families, something the police wouldn't do. They also wanted to drive the drug peddlers out of the neighborhood, and to get enough publicity, which was very important, to catch the attention of the Government, so that the Government would do a better job of picking up the garbage and so on.
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