Something similar happened while I was at my grandparent’s house recently.
There was a frantic knock on the door (and they clearly have a bell). My grandfather answers it to find two seemingly panicked boys. “Help! Help! There are boys out there and they’re beating us up and they’re going to kill us!”, they shriek. Without even asking to come in, they then proceed to run back out to the street where my grandfather can see their friends come and pretend to beat the others up. Their whole show was pathetic - I would honestly expect something a little more authentic from chronically bored kids.
Yet my grandfather believed every second of it. I suppose this comes down to him having grown up with a different level of honesty. My mother and I could instantly detect the phonyness, and walking onto the street afterwards revealed the boys watching from further down the street - waiting for some sort of reaction.
It really bothered and sadenned me to see my grandparents humilated like that. I know these kids are only really doing it because their parents are letting them roam the streets of a dull suburb of a once better town. But in a few years, they’ll probably have realised that they can get more than kicks out of it.
To add a positive note to my previous post, I have another great “beauty of people” sort of story.
A few months ago I had been drinking in Zürich, Switzerland, and planned to get home on the last ‘night bus’. Unfortunately I hadn’t realised that the ticket machines in town didn’t take bills and the bus (along with my friends) left while I pondered my predicament. I forcefully resigned myself to tackling the 13km uphill walk back home. As a sort of afterthought, I stuck my thumb out as I shuffled along, despite having failed to hitchhike on numerous other occasions. Several cars pass, and then to my amazement one slows down and stops.
The man driving the car had come across from Kosovo during the war. One of the very refugees who so many Swiss people would like to see banished from Switzerland. The people who are apparently corrupting society. I almost choked on the irony. He even drove me up a few extra kilometres from where he was headed, and joked about it when we missed my turn off.
Heck, I was terrified of police when I was 16 even without a previous record. He probably just didn’t want to have to explain to his parents and neighbors why he was coming home in a cop car.