C is for Crash

as when the neighborhood kids playing baseball in the street hit the ball through the big living-room picture window. For a moment, all the kids are frozen in place, looking at the broken window. Then they look at each other. They all see what's in each other's eyes. And then they run and hide.

Now, why did they run and hide? Sure, the big living-room picture window was broken. But what could the window do? The window can't jump out of its frame and start a fight. If the broken window was all that kids were concerned about, they could simply measure it, order a piece of glass the same size, take out the broken window, and replace it with the new one.

There is, however, something worse than the broken-window. There is something that the kids are frightened of and so ran away from. They knew they had been told not to play ball in the street in front of that house because they might just break a window. The kids know that the person who lives in that house is going to storm out of the house and start yelling at them and blaming them and grabbing them by the ears and punishing them. They feel doomed because they did not respect the relationship they had with that person. They are not afraid of the broken window. They are afraid of that person, and rightly so.