Israel under siege- again!
No this is not a musical review site, however if I was capturing a soundtrack in a cinematic view from my life to serve the purpose of self expression it would be this song. The song of course is from Crosby, Stills Nash and Young and most specifically from the Deja Vu, album or in my case cassette tape.
“Déjà Vu is the first album by the rock band Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and the second by the trio configuration of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. It was released in March of 1970 by Atlantic Records, catalogue SD-7200. It topped the pop album chart for one week and generated three Top 40 singles: “Teach Your Children,” “Our House,” and “Woodstock.”"
From Wikipedia.org-Déjà Vu (album)
Crosby, Stills & Nash – Long Time Gone (1977)
I have had some comments requesting videos, so the above link in is to a you tube video of a different song from Crosby, Stills and Nash. It occurs to me that as of the time of writing this post I do not have “the proper code” as a widget to properly display or embed You Tube videos on this site. I would like to suggest that you open the link in a new window or tab on your browser, by right clicking on the link above and select open in a new tab or window.
The point that I wanted to make right away has to do with when I was a child it just so happened that my small family unit moved around several times to different places in the country. Being a relatively tall kid, it seems the school yard bully (being the school yard bully) always had to pick a fight with me. Me having had this same basic scenario run by me, time and time again naturally sought to develop a code, that I could live by. So here is the little piece of code which I share with my friends who visit this site:
Typically the school yard bully would begin by teasing with me words, I did not respond. Then then he would push, so I would push back. If he slammed my locker shut, so (in gym) I would slam his locker shut. If would push me, I would push back. So far simple, right no particular code, so here is what the code states:
As long as he took the first swing, I felt perfectly justified in hitting back with everything I had. I fought fairly clean, mainly swinging punches at the body or face. It sometimes would happen that my opponent would get the better of me. For example one kid had me in a head lock with one arm and was punching me in the face with the other. Yes, he won that fight, that was in Sequoia Junior High School. I later found he was the school jock from some pretty blonde haired girl who basically only carried a brush to school. News of such things travels fast, she came up to me and said:
I heard you got into a fight with so and so, the blonde girl who only carried a brush said.
Yeah, I replied (I was not a big talker back then).
You know he is the school jock.
Oh, (a small smile must have flashed across my face)…
Yeah (responded blonde brush girl).. he’s quarter-back on the football team.
Oh..wow..really!
There were many other fights, and I remember them all. Once push came to shove I never backed down. One time there was this black kid in elementary school named Kevin, that I really did not want to fight, him because really pretty big and strong. He told me to meet him after school to fight, and I never showed up. (There are some more details to that story, but I choose not to share them here and now.) Mainly the thing to know about that fight was that it was not a spontaneous skirmish, he was trying to plan a fight that I simply did not think that I could win.
My code had not been developed to handle situations like that. The usual fights that broke out were in the early few days of the school year when I was the new kid in School that just so happened to be tall.
Yet most of the time the fights were never planned. They started and stopped where ever we happened to be at the moment. The fight I mentioned earlier with the school jock was only semi-planned. The pushing and shoving began in the locker room, and I basically did back to him whatever he did to me. However we were both suiting up for Gym and not yet fully in our shorts and sneakers. We both did not want to continue fighting in the locker room in this state, so it was his idea to take it outside in the open yard where we would be heading for gym.
I got in a few good punches to his face, but he pretty quickly got me in a head lock and must have landed several consecutive punches to my face. The crowd around us was relatively small probably because we had to suit up quickly for our fight and maybe some kids in the locker room were still lagging behind.
I was still trying to figure out how to get out of that head lock when the Gym teacher came and broke it up. I pretty much felt like I had lost that fight, however when the Gym teacher told me to go wash my face at the water fountain, I was quite certain this one would go in the loss column for me. Thankfully there was no blood. No visits to the nurse, no incident reports, no trips to the dean. no phone calls home the fight was over, and everyone knew it.
I won’t go on to tell you that I instantly became popular. I did however have that pretty cool conversation with pretty blonde brush girl. I never got picked first when they were choosing teams, never got to be a captain. When ever we played soccer I always was put into the position of goalie, even though this was not a particularly desired position, I liked it, and had plenty of time to think. I was pretty good at blacking the balls when ever they came my way. Therefore our team often won, and we got more points in gym then the losing team
The real point of this little story, is that school jock never picked a fight with me again because he knew that I would fight back. Of all the fights that I had on those dozen or so different battlefields we call schoolyards, I never did battle with the same guy twice, because that guy knew I would hit him with everything I had, as long as he swung first.
Stephen C. Sanders, June 11, 2010 12:55 Eastern Daylight Saving Time.
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