*Note: This piece was originally written in Winter 2014, forgotten about, and published when rediscovered a year later.
If you were assaulted on the street would empathy be your response? Here’s why it was mine.
As I lift myself off of the concrete sidewalk, two women nearby run to me asking, “Oh my god! Are you alright? Are you hurt?” Piercing pain pulses down my nose, across my lips and to my chin, and as I touch my face, I realize it’s from the freezing winter wind chilling the blood flowing from my nose and mouth.
The women lead me off of the dimly lit street into the girls’ school we’re directly in front of and to the bathroom. Looking in the mirror, my face has already begun to swell. My gums have torn from my upper lip, my nose is bleeding, but there are no broken bones and only a small abrasion on my cheek.
I’ve just been an unsuspecting participant of the infamous ‘Knockout’ game, where mostly teenagers punch unsuspecting passers-by in the face, attempting to knockout their victim in one blow. Unlike most knockout cases, my attacker was alone and didn’t flee the scene running away. The women who helped me said he only slightly turned his head to make sure nobody pursued him and kept walking. I never even saw the attack coming. Afterwards, I would struggle with the anger that arose and a jarring disconnect that comes with suffering the consequences of an attack without having fully experienced it. Oddly enough, it was in this vacuum of a clear place for blame to fall that created space to think deeply about accountability and the broader drivers of violence.
The street had been dimly lit, and the night was cold, with everyone I’d passed hidden away behind their layers. My attacker fully passed my field of vision before pivoting around to hook punch me from outside of my peripheral vision. I didn’t see the blow coming. At first, trying to make sense of what had happened, I felt surprisingly little. In addition to the numbing effects of shock, the anonymity of the assault made it even more difficult to process my response. It was as if I needed to place blame before I could allow myself to feel one way or another. The whole experience of victimhood became almost impersonal as I listened from an oddly removed place to the anger and concern of friends and family. People threw around words like ‘degenerate,’ even though they knew as little about him as I did. From this place of detachment, ‘degenerate’ started sounding more like a scapegoat. Assuming my attacker belonged to a lesser place–be it ethically or socio-economically–seemed to give people a false sense of security by identifying an easy enemy, yet he was still on the streets and we had no clue about what drove him to do it.
As time went on, it became easier to own and understand my feelings. I was less concerned with him being on the streets as I was with why he did it. It occurred to me that for a person to be able to hit another person–let alone a small woman–for no obvious motive, not even to make a quick buck, he must feel extremely angry. No surprise there, I felt that anger in the form of a fist on a collision course with my face. But the way he did it made me think he must have felt extremely powerless, too. Did the anonymity make it easier for him to disconnect with the implications of what he did? I think back to when I was a self-destructive teenager brimming with angst how I’d stupidly put myself and others at real risk in misguided attempts to discharge my own feelings. In spite of wanting nothing more than to hate him and move on with it, I couldn’t help but identify with – or at least somewhat understand – the need to cope with internal conflict by externalizing those feelings through anger and destructiveness. Possibly as surprising as the attack itself, my response to it became a mélange of anger and empathy.
Make no mistake, I am angry at my attacker, whoever he is–though considerably less than my friends and family are. I am angry at him for the physical damage he caused, but even more so for the fear he created. For the first time in my life, I was painfully aware of the vulnerability of being a small female, especially on an island with eight million strangers where the luxury of personal space is limited. But this societal wariness that lingers below the surface has stoked anger in me that seeks accountability from more places than just my attacker.
As Zaid Hassan wrote in The Social Labs Revolution, “violent conflict is a largely avoidable product of ineffective approaches to social issues.” Inequality is now strongly correlated with social issues like violence. I began to look at our practices that alienate and disempower people, which wasn’t hard to find. It’s smeared across the edifices of society. Instead of picturing the face of my attacker, all I could see was people depicted in the ‘Wolf On Wall Street,’ or as Sam Polk recently wrote in the New York Times, the CEO who feels justified in receiving $14 million in compensation and an $8.5 million bonus while his corporation advises its employees on how to live on poverty wages. My once tepid anger flared. These individuals and the consequences of their actions cause more than just one instance of a relatively obscure crime, yet almost never face any accountability for the cost it imparts on society.
There’s plenty of blame, anger, and accountability to go around, so let’s feed it up accurately. Merriam Webster defines a degenerate as “one degraded from the normal moral standard.” Perhaps ‘degenerate’ is an appropriate word to use, after all, but for a different kind of person than most who used the word are referencing. There are more levels of causality than an action and its immediate outcomes. An action does not happen in isolation, but as a result of a range of precursors that set the stage for it to happen.
I blame my attacker. I also blame the megalomaniacs and the institutions they hide behind to acquire power and money and meaningless material things at the expense of others. I blame the policies that overlook so many parts of our population, and overlook the injustices sanctioned in lackluster regulations for the fossil fuel and financial industries.
Some may write-off my response, because victims are often discounted as irrational; and the fact that I can’t place my attacker means I’m looking for a scapegoat somewhere. I would argue that it has given me a rare ability to approach blame and accountability in more objective way. In this instance, blame has been placed on both the attacker and the active drivers of the societal disease and inequality that feeds violence. What I am not saying is that aggressors should not take responsibility for their actions. They absolutely should. However, we as a society should consciously widen our definitions of victim and aggressor–and the word degenerate–and the sphere of responsibility to have a much keener understanding of the ripple effect of our politics and our businesses and our cultural practices. Only then can aggressors–in both the traditional and non-traditional sense of the word–be acutely aware of how they play into a vicious cycle of otherness, anger, and societal ill so we can take effective actions to mitigate them rather than exacerbate the problem through irrational reaction. In a social phenomenon like ‘knockout’, it’s not just about getting punched in the street by some ‘degenerate.’ We need to open our eyes in our anger and quickness to blame those that we don’t understand to be able to really address violence.
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