Random events

It was a pleasant evening tonight spent with three good friends—ladies’ night out. Such evenings are always too short, too infrequent, and too interesting. They always leave you wanting more so I guess that is a good thing. I can never get enough of good conversation and interesting discussions.

I walked home from downtown Oslo after dinner. It is usually a pleasant walk that takes about 25 to 30 minutes. It was still light out even though it was around 9:30 pm. About ten minutes from home I saw a young man a short distance ahead of me acting rather strangely. He was standing on a street corner judo kicking and boxing and generally acting agitated. As I passed him he turned and moved towards me, and I heard him say the following in Norwegian—“Alle er falske. Jeg hater dere alle. Skjønner du?” Translated this means—”Everyone is false (fake). I hate you all. Do you understand?” As I walked past him I stepped to the side to avoid being kicked by him, all the while trying to keep my cool, when mostly I just want to start running out of fear. I realized in that moment that he could very well have punched me or kicked me and that the randomness of these sorts of things is what makes life so unpredictable. He wasn’t drunk, but could have been on some type of drug or could have been pumped full of steroids.

All such behavior scares me. I try to avoid it as much as possible—the screaming agitated drunks and drug addicts that hang around the downtown train station, angry sports crowds, aggressive drivers, and people filled with hate whose life-goal is to spew out as much bile as possible. I would like to say I feel sorry for them, because their lives must be miserable, but I don’t. I feel sorry for their victims, the innocent bystanders of their random behavior and random violence, or their families that put up with them. I don’t have much understanding for this type of bad behavior. I never really did and it has intensified over the years. I know that some of my near-panic reactions are based on two earlier incidents in my life that occurred in the Bronx, where I lived for some years and where I went to college. I was nearly attacked in a bathroom of the college chemistry building early in the morning by an unknown man and also late at night in the Grand Concourse subway station. In both cases God was with me and I was ‘saved’ from God knows what by the intervention of other unknown persons who chased the potential attackers away. Those incidents marked me for life. I cannot forget them.

I wish it was possible to know what pushes people over the edge—when they reach the point of no return and turn violent. Then maybe we could try to prevent it from happening. But I will not be one of those people volunteering to help figure out why. I will instead be turning the key in the lock of my house door and shutting and locking the door behind me and thanking God that I can do that—that I can shut out the nonsense and the bad behavior in favor of the peace and quiet of home.