1. A fistfight.
2. The activity of fighting with the fists.

Help me with this. Generally, I have been limited to physical violence within my immediate family, and generally restricted to siblings. One sib could beat the crap out of me (and rarely did). The other sib was mine to pulverize, but that would be the one time that I would get the crap beat out of me. (See previous sentence.)

I tell my kids that fighting is bad. It is. Someone could get hurt. It could be them.

So, fighting is bad. Except when you get hit, especially if they are trying to intimidate you. Then, I say, you can defend yourself, but be prepared for the consequences. Like at their school, it would be suspension. But it could be worse.

This whole fighting thing is making me feel uncomfortable.

A lady was hit by a car in traffic and took off after the perpetrator. She chased him to a parking lot. She got out of her car to give him a piece of her mind. He ran her over. Her kid was in her car. Why would she chase after some punk with her first-grader in her back seat?

There was man–a grown man–coaching third base for the opposing team at my son’s game yesterday. He was yelling insults at our pitcher. A grown man, yelling that the 14 year-old on the mound was “scared.” The pitcher did NOT apppreciate the insults and thought about how it would feel to take the bat to the meanie. Meanie is my word, not theirs. But that is all the guy was. A 40-year-old man, insulting a kid with a bigger and better future than he has. The guy is a weanie.

My son helped talk the pitcher down. Later on, he told me that it’s much worse to hit an adult than a kid. There are rules in fisticuffs, I suppose. I think that the 3rd base coach deserved it more than a kid. But anyway, fighting is bad. And there are consequences.