A friend of mine is going to school for nursing, and part of her college path was a sociology course. One of her assignments was to survey some people she knew with a little questionnaire they’d given her. It was a list of nineteen items, each describing some sort of transgressible action; stealing money from an old woman’s purse, for example. They ranged in severity from cheating on a math quiz to blowing up a hospital for religious reasons. The goal of the exercise was to have those surveyed rank the items on the list from Least Severe to Most Severe, One being nothing and Nineteen being top of the chart, and then give their reasons for their rankings.

It was really insightful.

The gist of the results seemed pretty much what you might guess: We ranked things higher on the list depending on the amount of impact the action had and/or how negligent the action was. For example, we pretty much all put ‘blowing up a hospital for religious reasons’ high up on the list, but her father had it lower than us, and when we asked why, he cited the religious motivation as the factor for lenience. Similarly, when we compared our rankings of ‘murder for hire,’ her mother ranked it a little lower than us because “at least it was just a job, y’know, it wasn’t personal.”

The item that jumped all over the map between us was ‘hitting a child.’ The friend who was enrolled in the course had it somewhere floating around Fourteen, its peers being things like ‘stealing medication’ and ‘committing a hit-and-run.’ I gawked and asked her to justify it, and she did so by explaining the way violence against one so young can have very far-reaching consequences. Then she asked me how I’d ranked it.

Like, Three.

Then came the million dollar question. “Did your parents ever hit you?” I asked. To which I remember her scoffing and saying something to the effect of “Of course not. You?” I laughed an nodded emphatically. I had two such occasions to share, specifically.

The first, no matter how you slice it, was funny as hell. My mom was a lifetime Labor & Delivery nurse that worked nights. That meant that she was in the room where babies popped out into the world. It wouldn’t be until I’d become an adult that I was even halfway able to appreciate how bone-achingly difficult and exhausting that must have been to do while also raising a child and caring for an abusive husband. Yikes.

But I was an energetic little brat at times, an only child, and had very few friends growing up. So in the summer time, I mostly lived in an empty house by myself that had to remain quiet so my nocturnal mother could sleep. That didn’t keep me from craving attention and play time when I was about ten, though, and so one morning in particular she comes home and collapses in the living room recliner (like you’d do), and I start bugging her to hang out. I have a couple plastic lightsabers, the kind you hold a button and flick out with your wrist, and keep tapping her foot to have a duel with me.

Again and again, she waves me off, saying “Not right now” and such, but I just keep tapping her foot, asking, aggravating her, and saying “C’mooooon.”

Eventually, she springs to her feet, and I excitedly toss her the blue one. After all, I was about to have a duel, and I’d been practicing. We were about to have an awesome fight like there were in the movies: striking, parrying, fancy footwork, dodges, all the the rest. I guess somewhere in my excitement, I forgot that jedi have to be careful in their duels because their swords are actual plasma whereas mine were plastic.

Exhausted, cranky nurses don’t give a shit about your plastic swords or your fancy footwork. She walked me down, just raising and lowering her lightsaber in vicious blows with all the grace of a Bionicle action figure, until I was in a corner calling mercy. She dropped her lightsaber to the ground and walked off to bed saying, “There, I win.”

To this day, it was one of the biggest G moments I’ve seen out of another human being.

The second (which was actually the first – I’m telling them out of order, sue me) was a bit more serious, but is a story I tell more often. This time, I was nine, and my father had just passed away. It was maybe a few weeks to a month or so after his death, and we were still working out the dynamic in the house. She was no doubt totally spent, and I was a bit frayed, too. We were having an argument about something assuredly stupid, but what was important was how and where we were. She was sitting on the living room couch by the left arm rest, and as I think on it, I think she might have been crying. I was standing right beside her on the other side of the arm rest, and I was screaming over whatever the fight was about. I was throwing a tantrum, in short. Of course, I don’t remember at all what was being said, but I finally hit the right note, struck the right nerve, and her hand suddenly snapped back with all the quickness and automatic un-intention of a mouse trap being triggered.

She hit me right across my face, and there was just a stunned silence for a good five-count. Tears welled up and worked their way down my face, and I ran off to my room. Later, I came back out and apologized and we’ve been terrific friends ever since.

So, am I advocating for that kind of thing? Hell no, of course not. BUT I’m simply sharing that in my particular case, a lot of good came out of it.

I’ve also had this idea for getting middle school teachers to learn muy thai to settle unruly students, but so far it hasn’t really caught on more than getting me weird looks.

Maybe one day…