Troubling Information

Wicked boys fight like dogs and other brutes, by which they not only do each other great injury, but by such conduct they disgrace the human form and christian character. Here are seen two boys thus shamefully engaged. What a sight they present! Boys endowed with faculties capable of serving their Creator, and of planning means for each others' happiness are here seen wallowing in the mud and dirt, and striving to do each other harm! Perhaps one of these boys has for an excuse, that the other abused him and provoked him to such a degree that he could not endure it. Good children who happen to fall into the society of bad boys should immediately avoid their company, suffer abuse rather than resent it, render good for evil, and by so doing they will put to shame their enemies and gain the victory. Bears and lions, we know, sometimes growl and fight,

But children, you should never let such ugly passions rise:
Your little hands were never made to tear each others' eyes.

On the way out after his last negotiation attempt, he said to me, "Hang in there, buddy. Don't forget Orchard Street." He was talking about the morning in our junior year in high school when a woman sat down suddenly in the grass in front of us, and her grocery bag tipped over. He ran to call an ambulance while I sat with her. She was gray and sweaty and hung onto my shoulder and started telling me about how she had met her husband. How it was because he went back for his sweater, and how for a while she worried she didn't deserve to be so happy. Every so often whatever it was would grab her, and she'd clench my shirt in her hands. The ambulance went to Orchard Drive instead of Orchard Street, so it was twenty minutes getting there. I laid her down, and she kept my shirt in her hands. Chick stayed half a front yard away, watching. I had my hands on both sides of her head. When the ambulance finally came, they went about getting her ready to be loaded in; when they tried to separate my shirt from her fist and I saw her face, I said I'd ride with her. She nodded to them over and over again, and they figured I was family.

-- Jim Shepherd, "The Gun Lobby"