When someone punches you unprovoked, what moral rule should you follow?

While riding my bicycle past a housing project in the city of St. Louis yesterday, six teenaged boys ran up to me. I suspected trouble. One of the teenagers ran alongside me. I was concerned that he was going to push me off my bicycle, so I hopped off. He looked nervous, and we all froze for a couple seconds, with the other five teenagers standing about 20 feet away. The teenager closest to me suddenly reached back and took a swing at me, punching me on my right shoulder. I wasn’t hurt much, even though this kid was trying to hurt me. Though I had previously been in only one other fight in my entire life (a minor scuffle when I was about 10), I assumed that I could handle two or three of these teenagers (assuming that they didn’t have weapons), but not six of them. Instead of lunging for the attacker, I yelled, “Cut it out!” He immediately backed off, then all six young men scampered about 150 feet away, taunting me as they went. I crossed the road toward a restaurant and they stayed away. This all happened along a well-traveled road.

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Passion Fruit – 2010 48-hour Film Project Winner

What if you were given only 48 hours to write, shoot, edit and score a film? This is the challenging premise of the 48-Hour Film Project: "On Friday night, you get a character, a prop, a line of dialogue and a genre, all to include in your movie. 48 hours later, the movie must be complete." Local competitions occur in more than 80 cities worldwide. The 2010 winner of the 48 Hour Hampton Roads Film Project was "Passion Fruit," by Jon Abraham (Jon also happens to be a friend of mine--I wrote about his still photography here). Check Jon's winning film at the accompanying YouTube. He is now going to compete against the 80 other international 48 Hour Project city winners--10 of the films will be featured at Cannes. After watching Jon's film, I viewed the winners from some of the other cities. There is a lot of film-making experience on display. For instance, here is the St. Louis entry (the specific requirements for St. Louis were: Charles Crosby, Grocery Store Employee. Prop: a brick. Line of Dialogue: "We'll just have to wait."). Many of these entries are quite humorous. In addition to the above entries, consider this film called "Unwanted," the winner of the Portland Oregon competition.

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