Throwing Down the Gauntlet

When I took my daily peek at Lipby's livejournal site, I learned that one of his many comment makers had challenged a certain shitbird to a fight. Since I tend to avoid reading comments on Lipby's site so that I can spare myself from the shitbird's intricate and incendiary stupidity, I don't know if the whole thing was a joke or not. Either way, good for the challenger, says I.

I am a peace lover, but I guess I'm not a pacifist. I cannot deny that there are some people who are just begging for someone to go Aaron Burr on their asses. I'm not saying they deserve to be shot or run through with swords, but I wouldn't mind if they were at least slapped upside their bony heads.

There are fighting words. When some coward insults the very essence of my humanity, the call for satisfaction resonates in my chest. This is the scary stuff that cannot be explained by clockwork notions of human behavior. Fighting words and other realities of social interaction might not and should not hold up as an excuse for violence in a court of law. I haven't assaulted anyone since elementary school, but since then I've had some pretty gruesome ideas about what certain people deserved. I wonder what might push me to act on those ideas. I suppose if I believed I was truly in a corner and had no escape or recourse, I might do violence. I'd like to believe that I'd never really throw down the gauntlet, but that doesn't keep me from admitting that I wouldn't complain if certain people I've encountered got punched in the face.