Looking Outward: A Voice from the Grave

Dr. Thorndyke estimates that two out of every five persons have some sadistic tendencies. [17] To sadistic - minded persons, helplessness is always an invitation to cruelty. That is why we still spank children. We have largely abandoned the spanking of adults, not from motives of humanity, as many persons would like to believe, but because the adult is often able to do something about it, to kill someone and then dramatize the conditions leading up to the killing into a scandal that will attract nationwide attention. The child cannot do that.

At the age of twelve, the Writer had taken employment as a heater boy at Moran’s Shipyard, when the battleship Nebraska was then under construction, and he had turned the bulk of his earnings over to his mother. He violently hated his father and resented the fact that his mother would not take legal action to compel his father to provide for the family or give him carte blanche to do the compelling, which he would gladly have done with a pistol. On numerous occasions he was prevented from killing his father only by his mother’s influence, and after forty - eight years, he is only half convinced that it would not have been a swell idea, even though in later years he and his father became good friends. The odd thing was that his father, seeing the mess that had been made of both their lives, then agreed with him.

Then his father had taken a hand and told him that he must always fight back; that if he ever again came home whipped, he would be whipped again, and the Writer has not been whipped from that day to this. The next boy who took a poke at him received a broken arm, and it was almost a year before anyone else tried to put a hand on him. The boy who did so was five years his senior. He threw the Writer to the ground, grabbed him by the throat and drew back his other hand to strike the Writer. The next instant he was screaming with pain as the Writer’s teeth ground together in the flesh of his hand. A year later his father had struck him unexpectedly from behind and had knocked him into the dust of a road. He had come up out of that dust with a rock in each hand, and his father had received two broken ribs.