There are rules, Brandon…You punch somebody, you get suspended, no matter why you did it. Your actions have consequences. If they didn’t, you’d be the bully.
-- Leo Chavez (How We Survive)

Importance: As Brandon grows into adulthood in the post 9/11 culture, he must test his father’s old school logic. Brandon is suspended for hitting a kid in school. He argues the kid was a bully and deserved to be punched. By his father’s code of conduct, Brandon hitting the bully, even when the bully was pushing around a friend, is wrong. If a person can attack someone for what they see is a good cause, then that person becomes a de facto bully, the very thing they were trying to stop. In the closing showdown with Reshmina, Brandon comes to see in a moment of disconcerting clarity that by his father’s code of conduct America, and by extension Brandon himself...