See a bully, punch him in the face

I admire the folks that marched for nonviolence here last weekend.
Yet I can't help but believe that sometimes a little violence begets peace.
Take the case of childhood neighbor Bobby.
Bobby lived in the middle of my block, halfway between my house and my best buddy Cubby.
Cubby had a nice mom and a big old built-in pool.
But Bobby had decided he was going to make my life miserable.
It got to the point that I couldn't go down to Cubby's house without getting punched in the nose or put in a headlock by Bobby.
One spring day I came running home in tears, complaining of another beating at the hands of the neighborhood bully.
Dad was a patient man, but it was getting old, even for him.
He pulled the metal cap mechanism out of my black, plastic Tommy gun and handed it to me and told me to whack Bobby in the leg with it if he bothered me again.
"If that doesn't work, hit him right between the horns," dad said.
"Dan!" Mom yelled at Dad.
"It's plastic. It'll shatter in a million pieces before it hurts anybody," dad explained.
The point was to scare the big galoot, not hurt him.
At the time, I shook my head "Yes," but "Yeah, right," was running through my mind.
Had he seen this gorilla?
I went back outside, but I didn't go anywhere near Cubby's house or Bobby's.
Later that summer, Cubby's mom was reclining on a chaise lounge in their backyard as her husband installed a new rug. The rug came wrapped around a long, bamboo pole and Cubby and I were using it to pole vault, throw spears and just about anything else two 5-year-olds could do with something exotic like a bamboo pole.
Suddenly Bobby appeared out of nowhere, grabbed one end of the pole and began swinging it at us. This probably was more dangerous than even he could imagine.
Anyway, I was so angry, I ran up to him as the pole swung away from us and punched him in the mouth.
His big teeth raised a welt on my right ring finger.
I then turned and ran into Cubby's backyard and slid under his mother's lawn chair, scaring her half to death.
What I didn't know was that Bobby had run home crying.
His family's mangy dog bit me on the ankle a week later, but I never had a problem with Bobby again.