Post by Radrook Admin on Apr 8, 2021 21:29:27 GMT -5
Trust?
Trust is a beautiful thing if it is expressed towards those who genuinely deserve it. However, when trust is placed in those who don’t, then, when feeling the safest, we might very well be in the very serious danger of bodily harm and even of death.
It happened to that Roman General in the Teutoburg Forest when seemingly out of the blue, he was suddenly attacked by Germanic tribes that had set an ambush for him and for the very same reason. trusting someone as a friend who was really an enemy-in his case, someone whom he considered as a an adoptive son but who had secretly set him up for that ambush.
It happened to me as a kid in the following way. As usual, I was hanging out at a a lobby of Christopher Columbus Housing Projects with this Afro Puerto Rican fellow named Ramos . He who was three years older than me, or fifteen years old while I was twelve. I considered him a good friend.
Well, all was OK until this cute Latina girl that he was deeply infatuated with but lacked the normal courage to approach, passed by. As usual, he froze like the proverbial deer in headlights. I found it funny and chuckled. That’s when he calmly approached, no indication of anger or evil intentions whatsoever in his body language, and suddenly grabbed me by my legs and lifted me off my feet, and placed my upper vertebrae on the banister so it would act like a like a fulcrum to sustain my whole 135 pound weight.
Then, after approx. half a minute of inflicting severe agony, he shifted me further across the metal bannister so that the damage would also include my lower back. As the intense agony in my upper back and then my lower back rendered me voiceless, I realized that he was trying to cripple me.
Right then and there I knew that I would never be the same again and that the damage was permanent. I had been an avid bodybuilder and my body had been strong and healthy-and I had these grandiose dreams of being the next Lou Ferrigno or Steve Reeves as all the bodybuilding magazines kept promising that I could be if I only kept at it long enough. But all that suddenly would need to cease.
In hind-site, I later regretted not having taken retribution. After all, I could have easily attacked him form behind and broken his back with a baseball bat, or used a dumbbell bar on his head. An eye for an eye-as the saying goes. But that kind of vengeance was not part of my nature at that time. So he was lucky. Otherwise his punishment would have been just as unexpected as it had been for me, and far more severe. But as it unfortunately turned out, he damaged me for life, and escaped totally unscathed.
Well not totally, since a rock was bounced off his ugly head by my friend Woodrow a short time later, which partially compensated.
You see, my friend Woodrow, this African American just recently arrived North from the deep south, and who considered me as a brother, was very handy at aiming and throwing rocks. So when he once saw Big Ramos mocking me, he took good aim at his silhouette in the thick Branchbrook Park foliage where he was hiding, and BAM! Rright smack-dab on his head. To me it sounded as if he had hit a tree. In fact, I told him, “You hit a tree!”
So I was very surprised to find Big Ramos stretched out on the grass moaning in pain, and claiming that he felt nauseous and dizzy. Woodrow burst out laughing at his every moaned complaint. To be honest, I was afraid to laugh since laughing at this dude had caused him to try to paralyze me, and I imagined him suddenly coming at me again with the same intentions.
Of course, he was three years older, and I was smaller, so that could have contributed to his confidence in his attack. In any case, as he lay their moaning, stretched out on the grass with a white handkerchief on his head, Woodrow kept laughing right in his face several times, and not once did this coward ever get up or say a single word to him about it. Eventually, I couldn't help but laugh at the way Woodrow was laughing. Yet the coward did NOTHING.
I concluded that he was only extremely sensitive with kids who were smaller, and that he really preferred not to take a chance of fighting someone his same age and size who had just cracked his head open, and who was openly laughing at him, and seemingly wanting him to get up and complain about it.
Did I consider that busted head sufficient punishment for what he had done to me? No it wasn't. Perhaps had he lost an eye, or had been permanently brain-damaged, then it would have been. But as it turned out, he recovered from, that rock while I never recovered from the severe damage he inflicted on my vertebrae, damage that has caused me great agonies during my entire lifespan and numerous other serious neurological side-effects, such as inability to lift weights as I had done before, permanent sciatica, lower and upper back spasms, permanently numbed feet among other serious things.
Would I have laughed at him had I known the consequences? Of course not. But thinking myself in the company of a good friend, I never expected such a cowardly nasty thing. But what really bothers me most is the way that I continued to associate with the scum-bag even after he had done this. To me that is both baffling and infuriating and ads insult to injury.