It vibes me weird when Rod Dreher talks about his origin story of being pinned down by some classmates in a hotel room on a school trip and the adults not really intervening and him having some sort of revelation of the contingency and fragility of a system of justice

Because part of my origin is not far off but the exact opposite takeaway, I grew up in a housing development that was “townhouses” but that meant a normal cul-de-sac thing but with shared exterior walls and professionals doing the mowing, it was closest to an incongruously bougie British terrace house housing estate really

And it was projected to be where young families settled but a lot of them went to another development half a mile further out and smaller (“Colonial Greene”) so our development kind of became a “natural retirement community” and there weren’t that many kids so I hung with a bunch 2 or 3 years older

Which is a lot back then, I was mentally precocious and could keep up with them that way but they whaled the hell out of me, as boys do.

But just I remember, one time at recess in elementary school, on the swings in the new wood-chip area they just installed after 2nd grade, I remember Salt-n-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex” was on the radio so this would be 1991

And I realized that them hurting me and me trying to avoid it would allow them to control and manipulate me, and I realized that only worked, there was only a conflict if 3 things were all true:

1. They defeated me
2. I took whatever pain they dealt out as a negative thing
3. I had an idea of right outcome contrary to this

And so I decided to attack all of them: to fight back harder and more competently; to assign blunt force trauma pain a positive value; to accept the victor’s triumph as proper

And here I am. It honestly was as simple as that and when I recommend that it’s from experience, seems that most of his life Rod’s been chasing circuitous workarounds (Christianity! But somehow not as like, a human institution…) when turning the other cheek really works.