THE GLOVES ARE COMING OFF
Consider the saying ‘the gloves are coming off’.
It’s a fighting term from boxing. When the gloves come off and bare fists are used for striking the opponent the dirty, bloodier fighting begins.
Although historically, traditionally and currently that was and is the meaning, it doesn’t have to stay that way forever.
Another meaning can emerge from the same phrase.
Removing the gloves could also mean someone is refusing to fight any more.
Both meanings of the same phrase can coexist. One of the meanings doesn’t have to be retired or deleted or beaten to death out of existence.
You know of course, ‘beaten to death’ doesn’t necessarily mean that someone died. Or even that it involved a living being. It can also refer to spoken or written ideas.
‘Stop beating a dead horse’. Somebody had to be filled with rage to beat a horse to death and to keep up the beating even after the horse expired.
Or more likely it meant a dead horse couldn’t work any more than it already was working, no matter how many times you beat the horse. The horse was exhausted, so stop beating the dead horse.
Understand?
I’m not a fighter by nature. Most people are in one way or another. All my life people tried to force me to fight when I didn’t want to. I didn’t like anything about fighting. Not watching it, not doing it, not hearing it, not being around others who liked to provoke a fight, then sit back and watch the fireworks as if they had done nothing wrong and I never liked the result.
No one went home happy. There were regrets and blame all around but to what end? No end. There was no meaning to it, except that for some they just needed a channel to let out their meanness. And what made them so mean? I’ve been watching it all my life and I still don’t know.
People call it a mean streak. Do we all have one? Probably but in varying degrees.
Maybe it has to do with patience. Some people have an inordinate amount of patience with the inanimate chores and tasks, but have none when it comes to people or any kind of animal. Still others exhibit tolerance with all or some animals except for humans. Still others have no patience with certain types of behaviors, and either rage when they see it emerge in others or they go looking for trouble in the hopes of finding it.
This happens in families and all areas of communication in all facets of societies and cultures. Gender doesn’t matter, but I don’t know if it’s equal. Sexual orientation shouldn’t matter if gender doesn’t, but within certain orientations there may be differences.
Age may be a factor in mitigating it, with the middle agers being more in control of stopping it once it starts. But there are consequences for that too. No one goes home unscathed because someone self-regulated midstream. That need to be expressed comes out in many other ways which makes everybody know the night was not over, when everybody went home.
Apologies don’t work even when a person requests one; all it does is open the door to a tirade that encompasses the person’s entire life and everybody in it and every slight the person endured.
Lacking the ability to cope with perceived slights and rejections real or exaggerated and finding outlets to aggressively express them appears to me to be genetically determined.
So everyone lives with it because those who exhibit the signs of disruption can’t help themselves – plus family before them exhibited the same signs, which makes it all easier to accept as normal for them. They were born that way.
I’m not one of the subscribers to infants being born with a blank slate for brains, all infants being equal at birth, and it’s their interaction and observations in life that form everything about them, which makes them individuals.
Why they still teach that prejudice in college, like it was a necessary history, when everyone knows that it’s the history already written in the books, not the newly discovered facts disputing a faulty premise, that will be remembered. To whose benefit?
Well I can think of one with not much effort. Responsibility for the self and not simply the environment for one’s behavior. It’s not your heredity or DNA or any preexisting conditions that determine your behavior. It’s you. How you interpret and interact with your environment determines the type of person you become.
That’s a popular thesis accepted by many, especially when dealing with criminal aka law-breaking behavior that harms others.
You are not your parents or siblings.
- Ever notice how people use the word sibling(s) to replace brother and sister as if they don’t have a gender? I have a sister and brothers. That’s how I was raised, not by calling them siblings or siblings-in-law. That’s the British controlling the words of all English speaking people, which they tried to do globally by colonizing ninety percent of the planet.
You are not your race. You are not your gender. You are not your ethnicity. You are not your handicaps. You are not your socio-economic status. You are you and responsible only for you and your behavior.
Nobody else, except you, is responsible for your behavior.
Sounds not bad, pretty good actually. Well that’s how the English were raised and how they raised up every country, territory and island that they colonized by bringing them into their commonwealth plan for nations – all nations. All people are equal under God and the law.
If you violated any of those laws it was on you and you alone to atone, not kicked down the road a couple centuries to make somebody not born yet pay for past accused grievances and judgments rendered.
Consequently the British became big on punishment to make the individuals they colonized obey their laws and not misbehave.
Humiliation, especially when done publicly, was and continues to be the main form of punishment for all offenses – mild to grotesque to horrific.
Were they ready? Seems not, given the degree of strife in the world today. So where does that leave everybody?
It might be a better idea to self-correct.
Taking off the gloves to become even more brutal does nothing except prolong the torture and slaughter.
Take off the gloves and refuse to fight.
Don’t put the gloves on in the first place.
People spend too much time making war and not enough time making peace before war erupts.
Stop bombing the planet. It’s our homeland.
Explore your penchant for destruction and death used to motivate people to do what you want them to do, or as a means a revenge.
Your time is up (I know, shoulda, shoulda, shoulda).
I understand.
WORD WARRIOR DAVIES-TIGHT™ 