Saturday night in the Fort, I happened by a scene on 17th and Laurel, just a bit above that annoying four-way stop above Nero's and Fort Sanders Yacht Club: Two huge, shirtless white males were stomping around in what was hopefully an artificially induced rage, demanding any passing group of two or more guys to fight them.
The real momentum was coming from this enormous young man whose body looked like something out of Street Fighter. He would run around, bellowing incomprehensible challenges and actually assault people passing by with hard shoves and total area violation. While the other, smaller guy got in his share of meaningless intimidation, he did not stomp around quite as hard, assault people as much or cry out for blood quite as loudly as his steroid-munching friend.
Almost immediately upon coming across this — the kind of stuff you have no choice but to stop and watch — the couple was harassing and intimidating a group of five or more white dudes with guttural noises, shoves, facial and body gestures; of this group, the two largest started visually preparing for fisticuffs.
At one point, the scene perfectly resembled an arcade fighting game, with two opponents facing each other in rhythmic, looping, fighting stances, lacking only health meters. But then somebody got punched in the face, and a sloppy but genuine fight broke out. It's very hard to tell if the fighters — probably your average, grocery-shopping members of society during the day — had some sort of unconscious social contract with each other to not severely injure, or if they were really just that bad at fighting, because nobody got seriously hurt.
After the larger group dispersed, and the huge, insane dude took a few minutes to yell some more in apparent victory, the couple started really harassing people who obviously didn't want to fight. But before I could reach my phone to call the police — a renewed empathy for the bullied suddenly washing away the novelty of the situation — a brown pickup truck with two guys who had had a minor role in the previous fight pulled up next to the instigators.
Upon confidently disembarking the truck, it became apparent that one of them was brandishing a handgun. I can only guess that these dudes were attempting to make up for their lack of involvement in the fight by utilizing the power of the great equalizer — perhaps bringing a gun into a well-lit, high-traffic area on a home-game night seemed like a good idea at the time. Ironic how the people who actually did the least fighting took the situation the most seriously.
He pointed the pistol at the steroid guy (who's the alpha now, huh?), whose body language suddenly became very neutral. Upon seeing the handgun, his higher brain functions, which did not appear to have existed, were suddenly tapping on the shoulder of his self-indulgent primal instinct whose "night out" it had been: "This is the last time crystal meth gets to plan the evening, primal instinct."
Terrified yet completely intrigued, I had to keep watching and find out if the irrational, adrenaline-fueled behavior had reached its cap or if there was still more to come, but nary 45 seconds after the brandishing of the pistol did a police officer serendipitously drive past, stop and authoritatively hop to bust some heads. Higher brain functions ruled the day once more, and the four quarrelers started to nonchalantly walk away pretty quick. Maybe they got arrested, maybe they shot it out, but the police report is probably in this very paper. The point is, all of chaos and lawlessness of this uncommon display of recklessness didn't have the gravity of the cop's assertive gait.
At first, I was incredulous at the interruption of my social observations, but the sudden presence of law and order in this "Lord of the Flies" world I had been in for past six or seven minutes was inspiring. These two guys completely broke the boundary of even the terrible things I find appropriate; they were verbally and physically assaulting bystanders with great animation and intensity, and they were subsequently threatened with the novel occurrence of "vigilante" retribution.
But under American law, the guys who brought the gun to the party, no matter how selfish or selfless the reason, are in way deeper trouble than the the physical assaulters. A public disturbance on the route I walk to school that was characteristic of a third-world country (or at least somewhere slightly farther from an American university) was diffused with expedience and certainty. With all of the injustice in our justice system, I was grateful for this intervention.
—Wiley Robinson is an undecided sophomore. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu.