My father gave me three pieces of advice when I was a child which I have always remembered, and found applicable to so many situations.
1) Never pay for sex. There are enough people out there who will put out for anyone or anything that as long as you’re not choosy, you need never pay for it. While I am asexual, I find the principle applicable to a good many things in life. There’s almost always someone willing to give for free whatever it is you need… as long as you’re not choosy.
2) Don’t wait for the fight to start. Sucker punch him. Life ain’t fair, and good thing, too, or I’d have been the recipient of a lot of beatings over the years which I was able to otherwise avoid. If you know there’s going to be a fight and there’s no way to avoid it, don’t grab the guy and dance with him, don’t exchange insults; just smash him right on the button as hard and as fast as you can. And again, this rule is applicable to everything from lawsuits to public relations: don’t wait for a “fair fight” to develop, because you might lose. Hit hard, and hit first.
3) You don’t need to win every fight, just get at least one good one in so they remember you next time. I can’t stress how important this rule is. It’s the solution to nearly every conflict you will ever face in your life.
I’m 6’ 5” and the size and shape of a refrigerator. I have always been bigger than everyone else. My parents were worried that I might hurt someone, so they taught me to be a pacifist, never to raise my hand to another person. As a result, when we moved to a tough neighbourhood, I began getting beatings every single day. Eventually the beatings became so severe and sustained, with multiple people surrounding me and kicking me as I laid on the ground, curled foetally, that I required a police escort to and from school. When my parents asked some of the kids beating me why they did it, they answered, “Because he doesn’t tell the teachers and he doesn’t fight back.”
That night, my father – who had been an amateur boxer – brought me down in the basement and told me, “You’re going to learn how to fight.”
I told him I didn’t want to fight… so he punched me in the face.
Crying, I asked him why he’d punched me.
“If you’d had your guard up, I wouldn’t have been able to hit you. Put your guard up.”
I put my guard up. And he hit me again.
“If you’d had your guard up properly, I wouldn’t have been able to hit you. Put your guard up.”
And when, in time, I had learned everything he could teach me about fighting, he set me loose to hunt down the kids who had beaten me. Over time, I took on each and every one of them. Often I was facing older and larger kids, and in numbers, but my father told me that I didn’t have to actually win the fight. I just had to make sure that I landed at least one really good punch so that the next time they wanted to pick on me, they’d think twice and find an easier target. If I came home with a fat lip or a black eye or a broken nose, my father would ask, “Did you get a good one in?” And if I admitted that I hadn’t, he’d say, “Then I have no sympathy,” turn on his heel, and walk away.
Over the years, this experience has given me success after success as an activist. When I’m organizing, I’m facing forces which are infinitely stronger, richer, larger, and more influential than us. But in order to win, I don’t need to beat them, I only have to put up a fight good enough that I bloody their nose or blacken their eye so that they become wary about tangling with us in the future.
People could do far worse than to follow these rules.
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