I watch you get a running start and then unload upon an injured man sitting in the street. A broken man beaten, hurting, and in shock - your kick from behind, orchestrated, a running start, a foot planted squarely into the man’s jaw, knocking him flat, knocking him unconscious, yet you knew all along, you knew you were being filmed.
Your blatant disregard is for His image.
God’s image, written into this very man. But you carried out your attack as if your foot was engaging a football, a mere object of recreation, rather than the reality of a delicate head and face, already suffering injury, a head and face cradled by a mother, kissed by a wife, caressed by a child.
“You’re a coward, you are a coward!” screamed a girl to me sometime later after learning that I had followed the coaxing of my seventh grade peers and had lobbed my fist into the head of a boy, the twin, Alex, I think was his name, giving him a bloody lip. And when he turned around to look at me, his attacker, he looked
pained, not from the cowardly blow I had inflicted while his back was to me, but pained from the fact we knew each other and I had chosen to betray our friendship. For what? For the shallow glory the mob would give me. For joining in on “the fight.” Whatever the hell that meant I never figured it out.
Gary Edward Geraci