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| No one ever said this to me. |
I don't really know if there is a way that a person should feel during and after the threat being issued. I do know that after the first time I had this wickedly humorous, in an idiotic way, desire to see if there is a good book of instructions about how to deal with the present, the past and the future of such an episode. I never found one, not even in the Google era.
I suppose I should tell you that the first two times that this happened to me I was a person of the cloth. To this day I don't now if that had anything to do with my feelings and my behavior. I do know that I told the first guy to get lost and look for his balls along the way. I'm not so sure whether I should have done that or not, but hey, that was 60+ years ago. His kid brought a Colt .45 to school -- loaded, of course. The principal came to see me to ask me to disarm the scum. I did. The father came to reclaim the gun. When the father threatened to use the gun on me, I felt pretty safe because I had the ammo upstairs in my dresser drawer. He never came back, neither did the son.
There was the time that the mayor of the municipality confronted me with his Magnum. The view down the barrel of such an imposing piece of weaponry is rather dark and bleak. It was in the streets of San Mateo, a frontier town in the northern part of the Philippines. I played the "you don't want the blood of a martyr irrigating your lovely gravel streets, do you, Mayor?" card. I won.
I was threatened by a drug skank in an apartment complex that I was guarding. He was a slimy character, skinny, scraggly, unkempt beard and vile, I mean vile, breath. He said that he was glad that we were alone because then I could never prove that he promised to kill me. I told him that I had already given his plate number to the roving patrol supervisor and that alone or not, his ass was already grass. He told me that it was not the last that I would see of him and I told him that he didn't have the spine to kill me in cold blood at point blank range. As he parted, I told him to remember that life in the slammer as Bubba's luv trick is maybe not the reward he would like to expect for killing me. He never broke the parking rules of the complex again.
The other threats were men's room messages written on the walls of the urinal section at work. No big deal.
You've got the image by now that for some odd reason, I was never, I mean never, shaken by this kind of behavior. Don't ask me why. I don't know. I have thought about it a lot, to no avail. The one thing I came up with about the incident in the parking lot was that if the animal was going to kill me, he wouldn't tell me his intentions. Why else would I be aggressive during these moments? Since then I think of these moments as reminders of the prayer of St. Peter in the fifth chapter of his first letter where he talks about the "roaring lion seeking someone to devour." It shows that Peter didn't know the first thing about lions. When they are seeking, they are silently slinking, not roaring. So the lesson is, neither the roaring lion nor the barking dog is going to eat anything. So if your going to kill me, just shut up and do the deed without announcing it.
By the way -- Go ahead and tell your literalistic, fundamentalist bible thumping friends what I just said about Peter. Have fun.
By George:
ReplyDeleteYes, I Had My Life Threatened: I can't recall ever having my life threatened directly; although, my first wife probably thought about it a great deal and I frequently wondered when she was about to actually do it. Never the less, in personnel work, there was rarely a week that went by that some person didn't threatened to sue me and the company!