When I was in college, I witnessed something that would change my outlook on awareness and self-defense forever.
I was leaving a four-story residence hall in which one of the university’s dining halls was located. I had just come from dinner and was feeling relaxed and untroubled. As I exited the building I stopped to see what was going on – for a crowd of people was staring up the large hillside into which the campus was built.
We watched and a few people pointed and muttered. We watched as a lone student, someone I did not recognize, dragged a metal bed frame down the hill. I remember him as tall and skinny, an unremarkable fellow with a tan complexion and slightly disheveled hair. He moved with determination and without a word, the bed frame scraping the asphalt walkway as he tugged it along.
No one questioned him. No one stopped him. We watched as he walked up to the old brick-faced building, upended the bed frame, and climbed it like a ladder. The corner of the frame shattered the window of the room he was boarding like a pirate. He scrambled in through the opening.
I walked into the building. The student burst from a room on the lounge level – the room that was, I would learn later, below the room occupied by a young woman who’d just dumped him. Crazed and screaming incoherent oaths, he stopped in the hallway.
I froze.
I knew I should do something, but I did not know what . Like the twenty or thirty people who had watched this bizarre scene unfold, I was unprepared for a scenario outside the normal. My brain clicked to a stop, unable to process a situation with which it had not been prepared to cope.
A resident advisor, a student with nominal authority within the hall, appeared from somewhere. He was an unremarkable fellow, totally average, with no pretensions to “tough guy” status. As I stood there like a moron, he braced the crazed student.
“Get out of here!” he yelled. “Go! Get out! Get out!” He yelled that guy out of the building, following him and shouting until the student had fled down the street. The local police appeared shortly thereafter. Spectators pointed them in the direction of the disturbed young man.
I learned later that after his girlfriend dumped him that evening, she had locked him out of her room. He responded by trying to kick in the door. A locksmith was called to remove the bent deadbolt and free the poor young woman. I assume that it was after he failed to kick in the door that this unbalanced student went back to his own building, got his bed frame, and went nuts pirate-style. I don’t know what was done to him, but they did catch him and he never returned to the school (at least to my knowledge).
I thought about that incident for a long time. I’d spent time armed. I knew how to fight, or thought I did; I was taking Karate at the time. I fancied myself tougher than the average guy and was known as such in certain circles.
Yet I stood there and watched. I froze – not once, but twice when it mattered.
I was not alone, of course. No one else watching that day thought to say to that troubled student, “Hey, what are you doing?” No one thought to run up and kick the bed frame out from under him when he started climb it. No one went for help. No one tackled him after he broke through the window. No one did anything.
It’s a natural reaction to freeze up in times of crisis. Normally it takes only one person in the crowd to act, one person to rush forward when someone falls or collapses or has been injured, to break the reverie into which spectators sink in times of crisis. That day in the residence hall, it was a guy named Joel, a resident assistant with true courage, who acted when no one else would. It was not a bearded ruffian in an Army jacket who’d just wandered up from the basement dining hall.
I made a promise to myself that day. I vowed that I would never again be complacent, that I would never again fail to act when confronted with the unusual. I have not always been successful in keeping that promise to myself. I have tried, however. I engage regularly in scenario training and visualization towards this end. When I see something or someone out of place, I start asking questions and poking my nose into the situation. When I fail to do this, I am always painfully reminded of my promise.
I will never erase the memory of my failure to act – nor would I want to erase it. The incident will forever remind me of the dangers of complacence.
Years later, I was in a bookstore at the mall when a young boy’s loose shoelace got caught in the escalator. He yelped as the machine dragged him off-balance. I saw what was happening, snapped open my Gerber EZ-Out, and went for the escalator to chop his lace free – when his parent or legal guardian reached him first and pulled him bodily free by the waist. I quietly folded my knife and went about my business unnoticed, but I remembered the incident. I remembered and was glad that I acted without hesitation to a scenario I would not have imagined and did not expect.
I share these personal stories simply to illustrate something we’ve all experienced: the need to act. Complacency kills awareness and slows our reactions to danger and emergencies. Complacency is the handmaiden of pacifism. Complacency is our enemy and we must fight it at all times.
Do not be complacent. Do not fail to act. Learn from your mistakes and do not repeat them. Remind yourself constantly not to fall into the trap of inaction..
Thank you, Joel, wherever you are, for teaching me that lesson so long ago.