Walking home from dropping my daughter off at school today, I was treated to the sight and sound of a driver shrieking obscenities at another man as he crossed the street carrying his two year old. I missed what sparked the driver’s outrage. I suppose it was something having to do with the father’s not stepping into or across the road according to the driver’s master plan. I’d like to imagine the driver was still drunk from the night before – nursing a crippling hangover – or maybe he was feeling hopeless and broken-hearted about the implosion of capitalist civilization and the destruction of the ecosystem, both of which will result in the deaths of many millions over the next few decades. Whichever, it was a verbal outburst seething with violence and the driver didn’t give a flying fuck how many school kids were within earshot.

But the interesting bit was when the dad, two year old cradled in his arm, charged back to the car, chased it out into the street as it pulled away, and punched it. Maybe he was still drunk from the night before too, or perhaps his honor and dignity – and that of his child – had been irreparably damaged. Or maybe he was too out of sorts about that whole end of civilization routine.

I really wondered if the two men were going to go for it there in front of the school, the driver leaping out, letting his car coast off down the hill into someone’s front yard, and the father swinging his two year old like a mace, clubbing in the driver’s head, with the boy’s blinky-light shoes flashing. And I found my own anger boiling up with theirs, spontaneously, sympathetically. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later Rage is real and very contagious. I wondered what I would do if/when they started going at it. Would I jump in and try to stop a fight? Would I thrill to kicking in the head of the bad guy? Would I take the two year old in the midst of his being wielded to inflict the fatal blow and pull him aside and tutor him the way of all righteousness?

No. I would start shooting.

I would start shooting. I would pull out my phone and start recording it. That seems to be what I do. I would want a record of it, something that the cops could be shown maybe, should the event precipitate arrests. I would want a record of it anyway.

If you’re a writer, a thing doesn’t really seem to exist until you write it. If you’re a filmmaker, a thing doesn’t really seem to exist until you shoot it. I know that sounds pretentious, but it seems to be true for so many of us. Maybe because we’re so saturated in a world of electronic illusion and fantasy that intimate moments, moments of real human interaction, positive or negative, have to be passed through our chosen medium before we’re able to perceive them as being real. I know this happens on a large scale with news and media and that dreadful succubus The TV. In our world, nothing is real until the screens say it is real. A thing can be half real, mostly real, but it will never be a real boy until the screens say it is.

Yes, I would start shooting.

I visited the Occupy London camp in front of St. Paul’s last year. One time when I was there, a young German man – perhaps a bright, up & coming intern at Barclays or RBS – burst into the Encampment’s Welcome Tent, iPhone camera blazing, trying to get the Occupiers at the desk to admit that because they accepted anonymous donations, they might be laundering money. I felt a bit sorry for the German. He was deep in enemy territory and was just a corporatist footsoldier following orders. But he was there to make mischief. And this is war.

As I watched him doing his level best to generate anti-populist propaganda, I felt that anger rising – The Rage.

So I started shooting back. We faced off in an iPhone triangle, a social media intoxicated Quentin Tarentino tableau, each capturing the photons bouncing of the other, each accusing the other of villainy and more villainy, with the cameras confirming the reality of it all.

Is the pen/camera really mightier than the sword? History still can’t make up its mind on that one. But bullets and fists and guns are inevitably vectors for The Rage, the pen and the camera vectors for truth. Maybe. But we do have a choice.