[a little late but I've been meaning to post:]


Don't call it bravery

A year before his lousy heart hustled him into the grave, my old man -- craggy, cranky, emphysemic -- ran the town bully out of a coffee shop in some pissant Ontario burg.

This thug walked up to two suits in their 30s at the counter. The bully was not small. He jabbed his thumb into one businessman's doughnut, scooped out the cream and licked it off. Then he did it to the second. The waitress froze. The suits backed away and walked out. As the old man put it, "They ran away slow."

Then they guy came over to my dad's table. Grinned. Bad teeth. He looked like this was the most fun he'd had all day.

My father -- past 70 and walking around in a failing body that would kill him in less than 12 months -- looked up. He had it worked out. If things went south, his coffee had been poured just moments before, lawsuit hot. Coffee in the guy's eyes, get off the one good punch he figured he still had in him after all these years, and then, wheezing for breath and trying to get a nitroglycerin pill under his tongue, "Hope for the best."

He said to the bully: "Do it and it just might be the last thing you do." The bully's smile went away and he looked at the old man and laughed.

But he left.

Mom was furious. "Risked his life over a doughnut." With the weariness of a man who has been explaining himself without much result to the same woman for more than half a century, the old man said, "It wasn't about the doughnut. It was about me." [snip]

Which brings us to the events that transpired last week on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba. A sleeping man was attacked with a large knife and decapitated. The passengers and driver fled. A passenger and a trucker who'd pulled over -- the heroes of the piece -- armed themselves with a crowbar and a hammer and kept the suspect in the bus.

A psychologist interviewed by Sun Media hit the proverbial nail square and true when he said:

"This isn't like Texas where an old lady can pull out a gun and defend herself."

That's right. It isn't like Texas, or most of the U.S., where the right to self-defence is considered a divine gift.

In Canada, whenever some Good Samaritan tackles a fleeing rapist or mugger, the police utter the politically correct, nonsensical boilerplate: "It's important citizens don't take the law into their own hands ... bystanders should be careful not to get injured ... blah, blah, blah."

No wonder the people on that bus fled before one turned back once armed. They did as they were trained to do, they met fully the responsibilities to one another that have been driven into them. And a police officer, in phraseology worthy of Big Brother, said: "They were very brave [?]. They reacted swiftly and calmly in exiting the bus and as a result nobody else was injured."

No one knows if they'd react bravely in such a situation. I'm not willing to sit in judgment on those who fled. But I'm not willing to laud them for bravery, either. But am I wrong in assuming that somehow they quit making people like my old man?

Yes I am: Brave was the guy with the crowbar and the guy with the hammer.

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