Wait, whuck? I’m GenX and a former skateboarder, what animosity?
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No.
It’s literally like having some guy punch three different kids in the face before one of them bashes him in the head with a skateboard to make him stop.
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Bullshit. Self-defense is not a crime.
I’m sorry your friend was blindsided. That was the skater’s fault.
This wasn’t. Don’t start fights. And if you do start fights, be ready for others to end them. Getting beaned with a maple board was the aggressor’s fault. He’s not the victim; he’s the asshole who threw the first punch…and the second punch…and the third punch. Keep punching and the board will hit back.
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The usual authoritarian mind-set BS. Same reason racists don’t ever die out - hate is a learned behavior. The GenXers who hang out here at the BBS are generally a more enlightened crew than you’ll find at your local school board meeting. Plenty of Karens and Kens are GenX or younger.
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I grew up skating on the back end of the Lords of Dogtown timeframe and knew a some b-list pros. Those guys were juvenile delinquents and very anti-establishment (jumping fences and damaging pools in vacant houses isn’t the most domesticated scene) they were mostly good guys who just wanted to smoke weed and skate.
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if he’d just pulled a gun and shot the dude in the face instead of bashing him with a deck, it would have been legal standing ground in many states.
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I’d prefer to live in a world where murdering someone with a gun was not punished less harshly than a kid defending himself with his skateboard.
@GulliverFoyle: Creepy. 
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What is it about anti-establishment generations/parents raising super-conservative kids? I remember Michael J. Fox had a TV role like that on Family Ties, which seemed funny at the time. I’m just wondering how much is multi-generational control mindset vs. a rejection of everything the parents believe.
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I don’t know, but it’s one of the things that keeps me up at night as a parent of a kid entering puberty.
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Not to drift too far off topic, but I think part of it is the way parents raise their kids. From what I’ve seen, the children who rebel the most against their parents’ values tend to have parents that tried mold them into what they thought they wanted them to become rather than giving them the tools to build themselves and trusting them to exercise self-determination.
General Leia Skywalker Organa Solo covered this in a 1977 historical documentary…
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Good for the kids, hope he didn’t fuck up his deck. I wonder if the asshat will be quite so quick to fuck with kids again.
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I don’t understand the context; was this guy just offended by the sight of skateboarders? I’m pretty sure there’s nothing new about skateboards in LA, and the aggro seems unmotivated, like the Erick von Zipper vs. Frankie and Annette stuff from the 1960s beach movies.
Speaking as a veteran of too many fights, there’s nothing wrong with defending yourself with whatever is at hand. However, Erick was already down when the kid whaled on him with the board. That feels maybe a little over the top to me.
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over a quarter-century ago my friends and i were driving around doing dumb shit all punk rock style when we ran across a couple of kids skating. we acted uber aggressive and they took off running. it took us some time to find them to apologize, give their decks back and explain that it probably would’ve been better to use the gear as a weapon.
we really felt bad about it. they were scared shitless.
Don’t start none won’t be none
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Ah, so we’ve skipped over the criminal damage that the kids were causing to start all this. Nice link.
The main issue is about the unnecessary escalation. Kid-puncher didn’t have to go there, but he did.
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Sitcoms being sitcoms, they tried to soften Alex over the years through various means (the progressive girlfriend, the “very special episodes”). To very end, though, at his core the character was still a young fogey who chose to side with privilege and greed as a form of rebellion against his (admittedly smug and self-congratulatory and sometimes hypocritical) early Boomer/Bobo parents.
Alex’s worship of Milton Friedman and Nixon and Reagan never really took with most Gen X viewers at the time, but he was still a popular character with them because he was clearly an intellectual match for his self-satisfied parents (who still tended to win out due to being more emotionally mature). It’s the some reason most of us now-older Xers still tend to side with the kids when they’re being bullied by someone older and more privileged.
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