Violence on the streets of Chicago

Well, sort-of-violence.

I was walking out of the Lakeview synagogue earlier tonight, at the same time as a bunch of little kids were being let out of daycare.

This one kid, probably about 10 yrs old, is climbing onto the snow-covered metal banister leading down the front steps outside the building.  I can already tell this is going to turn out bad because the banister is pretty high up, and there is snow and ice everywhere.

Of course, he starts to lose his balance, and jumps off the banister in an attempt to reach the bottom of the stairs.  But he catches the last stair with his foot, and takes a small spill onto the concrete sidewalk.  Not too bad of a fall, but probably scraped up his hands a bit.

But suddenly, this kid gets pissed that he fell, and he starts to yell at his younger brother, claiming that the younger brother pushed him off the banister (which I'm pretty sure wasn't true because I saw him lose his balance.)

Anyway, the little brother (probably age 7) is just minding his own business, but the older kid is super pissed, and keeps yelling at him.  And then he walks up to the younger kid and punches him right in the face!  A solid right jab!  And the younger kid is pretty small, so this punch hit the entire side of his face, and hard.  Poor kid.  :(

The older brother was super pissed

Now the worst part of all this is that the mother, who was standing nearby the whole time, basically does nothing.  She very calmly and passively tells the older kid not to hit his brother.  And that he should apologize for making him cry.  But she clearly wasn't going to discipline or aggressively criticize the older kid.  Grrrr....I wanted to punch her!!  (but I didn't, just to make that clear.)

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that older kid is going to have some anger and discipline problems if his mom isn't tougher with the rules.  And if I bump into that kid again sometime in the next few weeks, I'm going to let him know that punching his little brother is not cool.  (Maybe I'll push him down the stairs to teach him a lesson....hmmm...)

PS.  Punching younger siblings is NOT cool.  I only ever punched my sister once, but she was older.  And she deserved it at the time.  (I don't remember why I punched her, but it had something to do with an apple I think.  I don't really like apples.)