Years back, a few of us went to visit a friend on Elliot Place. What started as a regular day turned into something I still think about. A group showed up with chains, bats, knives, and pit bulls. There were maybe twenty of them against three of us kids. We weren’t looking for trouble. We weren’t part of any crew. The friend we were visiting was just like us, a regular kid interested in the same stuff we were. But they treated us like we were rivals or a real threat.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make sense of what happened that day. The level of aggression, the sheer numbers they brought, the weapons, the dogs. It didn’t match what we were doing there. We were just three kids from the same neighborhood, going to the same schools, living in the same area. There was no real reason for it to go down like that.
We ended up calling some of the older guys from our block to help us get out of there. That situation could have ended much worse than it did. Even now, thinking back on it, I can’t really reconcile how young people can shift into that mindset. The willingness to escalate something so quickly over basically nothing.
I don’t know what became of those guys. I wonder about it sometimes. Whether they’re still around, whether they are alive or in prison, whether time changed how they look back on it. It’s one of those moments that sticks with you.
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