“How often have you seen the victims win a revolution, then become worse than the original oppressor? How often have you seen someone vanquish a school bully and then become just as toxic themselves?”. ANTONIO DI DIO continues his series on the Short History of Kindness. 

The most important things in life depend on where your life is. Right now it’s preparing for Senate Estimates, a difficult patient diagnosis to share, and the return of some adult monsters to disturb our Downton Abbey-watching, empty nesting lives.

Next week it will be something else. In 1976, though, the most important thing was whether Angelo or Mario would pick me in one of the after-school playground soccer teams.

It’s the Angelo Radice Elementary School in my Sicilian home town Gela, and the daily soccer match begins with stress.

Angelo was the captain of one team every day on account of being the best player in the whole school, and Mario was the captain of the other team, as he possessed the vital quality of owning the ball. Owning the ball in those days made you both chief minister and treasurer. 

In the same way that it happened in Australia and probably every other country, captains one and two would take turns selecting a player.

I liked it when there were an even number of players because being the last one picked at least I get on to a side. I’m not saying my talents were ignored, but Bianca was on crutches for a whole term and still got picked ahead of me, as she used those sticks with a skilful viciousness that echoed her mum’s laser-sharp shoe throwing when her brother had transgressed at anything. It was tougher when there was an odd number as I would be last and left out. 

Outshining the Olympics and Italian earthquake that year was the dramatic improvement of Gino’s game, who’d become far superior to Angelo and everyone else. 

After various challenges foreshadowing young tyros fuming on the backbenches, the old order changed. Ball owner Mario, aided by Bella and Maria who wielded the political power of their dad’s owning the pizza shop and the bakery respectively, anointed Gino as the Other Team’s Captain.

Gino’s challenge then was what to do about Angelo, a man known to react to difficulty with fists of fury. Especially as bad blood persisted between them on account of the mysterious disappearance of some Mars bars and Juventus footy cards.

Voices had been raised. Teachers had been involved and we had lost a match to a neighbouring school when one had refused to pass the ball to the other standing before an open goal. Shakespeare wrote nothing like this. Puccini came close.

On his first day as captain, he came to his first selection. We held our breath longer than Marco’s dad, the abalone diver. Astonishingly, Gino’s first selection for his team was… Angelo. And he picked his former nemesis first, every day thereafter! 

After school I consulted dad, gainfully unemployed in the town square with sundry uncles guarding their pride and sipping something slowly.

Why did Gino pick Angelo first? His somewhat Mediterranean view was to quote the title of the autobiography of the popular Sicilian gangster Turi Giuliano, “God protect me from my friends”. 

Mario Puzo homaged the line in The Godfather with the classic: “Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer”. I actually asked Gino about it one day when he deigned to talk to the guy with the funny accent and he said, simply: “I just felt sorry for him. He may be a Roma supporter, but he’s still okay”.

How often have you seen the victims win a revolution, then become worse than the original oppressor? How often have you seen someone vanquish a school bully and then become just as toxic themselves?

I remember reading about the downtrodden revolutionaries in Russia in 1917 and how it didn’t take them long to brutally murder the Tsar and his family, and thought of a hundred playground moments.

I often think of Gino’s simple genius to respect the person he’d defeated, from which everyone benefited, and in whose duty he was much more Mother Teresa than Machiavelli.

He took Angelo and had made him governor-general or foreign minister rather than humiliatingly dismiss him to a back bench.

Kindness is having the authority to take authority in a situation, with the option to be self promoting, cruel, and to “never split the difference”, and to choose to split the difference.

Not too long later I heard that both the boys had difficult lives, while mine involves the endless gratitude of living in this wonderful town in this wonderful country.

Local GP and ANU associate professor, Antonio Di Dio says he’s been a bad influence on medical students since the late 1980s.