the old hit n' run

Something odd happened today. I know this is the big city and all, but sometimes very odd things happen that I don't like.

For example:

Walking down the street, some kid jumped up and whacked Craig on the back of the head, then ran off. "It was that kid!" I yelled, pointing, in response to C's loud OW. The kid turned around and flipped us off. C yelled "WTF?" (only he didn't say the letters w-t-f, he actually said the words that they stand for that I am too lazy to type. And yes I realize I just typed a long sentence that could have been avoided.) and the kid ran some more down the street and turned and gave us the bird again.

This was seriously a kid. He was like 8 years old. His friends were all older than him and weren't running with him or encouraging him, but they weren't stopping him either.

As we watched (they were now in front of us walking the same direction), the kid did it to several more people. He would jump up and slap them on the back of the head. Once he jumped over the barrier at a movie theater, hit someone, and jumped back over. He did it to a woman who turned around and yelled at him, to which he replied "I'm sorry lady" but you know that he wasn't sorry. He had said the same thing to C not 5 seconds before.

I was really mad and that kid wouldv'e been dead if he'd touched me, but C is much more nice about these things. "What can we do about it?" he resigned. There were no cops around because they're always at my train station for some reason but not on a busy street when I need them. Then we found the store we were looking for and went inside. I was still really mad that nobody had done a damn thing while we watched this kid slap like 10 people. A mini argument ensued about how doing anything in retaliation would be illegal, even though what the kid was doing was already illegal. But the fact that he was a kid made hitting him back (or pushing him in front of a cab, as I suggested) even more illegal. We settled on the fact that if we had a kid with us, our kid could go beat up that kid and nobody would get in trouble with Johnny Law.

But it was a stupid thing anyway.