It appears that for the briefest of moments in time, a 95-year-old man named Arthur Kemberis became a vigilante of sorts. He wasn’t stalking the streets brandishing a bow, batons, or even high-tech gadgets. Rather, he was armed with just a simple cane as he aggressively defended himself against a would-be mugger who thought that grabbing his wallet would be an easy score. It wasn’t.
According to local news reports, a typical day in Manchester, New Hampshire for 95-year-old World War II veteran, Arthur Kemberis of walking from a Walgreens pharmacy to pick up a prescription for his wife would quickly devolve to something potentially deadly. He would be confronted by a male suspect who attempted to grab his wallet several times. However, instead of some quick easy cash, the pusillanimous pilferer received several shots from Arthur’s cane. After numerous attempts to grab the wallet, the would-be mugger was eventually driven off when the struggle started attracting attention.
While this story seems to reinforce how spectacularly screwed up of a place the world has become that a 95-year-old man can’t walk in the streets with impunity, Arthur’s fighting fortitude is clearly an inspirational externality of this incident. The attempted assailant was described as a 5’ 10” 165 pound white male in his 30’s who Arthur describes to Boston’s WBZ-TV, “a young man, a good-looking man.” While he remains at large, he was seen in surveillance footage and soon the only runway on which this particular individual’s good looks should have him walking is the cell block of a prison. Whatever can be said for the desperate, sometimes understandable motivations of criminals, to reach a point in your life when you are accosting the elderly with force for some petty pocket change implies a serious deficit in honor and morality that has to be difficult to overcome.
Yet, the message that could be derived might be interpreted to broadly inspire people to “fight back” against attempted attacks, such an idea might prove to be prospectively deadly to widely convey. Clearly, Arthur was no physical match for the mugger and that ordinary walking cane became what may have been his saving grace, depending on the robber’s intended outcome of the confrontation. If not for outside intervention, it may have only been a matter of time before Arthur was overpowered and left to a bad fate. However, call it a byproduct of “The Greatest Generation” or just an unquenchable fire in his belly, he wasn’t going to just stand idly by while some ethically putrid parasite of person tried to target him.
That may not be a cohesive message, but ultimately, the real world rarely provides genuinely usable lessons with the kind of certainty that you can put on a poster. So, rather than dance around the subjective themes surrounding criminal apprehension, we can take a simpler message from all of this; namely that World War II veterans are extremely badass human beings.
