Cathy Ewing found herself flying backward in a flash of red. : The Result of a Punch in the Face

In a society that has canonized John Wayne and still glorifies the quick draw, that punch in the face suffered by Cathy Ewing is no big deal. There were close to 800 murders last year in Los Angeles alone and another 21,000 cases of aggravated assault. A hundred of the murders and 4,000 of the assaults were in the Valley.

Ordinary people, even as you and I, were skewered, shot, beaten, strangled and otherwise violated in their homes, on the streets and in the canyons, their bodies left sprawled and bleeding, pain beyond agony their final legacy to the world that did them in.

We’re not talking gang members or cops or Mafia hit men here, but just plain folk who eat tuna casseroles and hope to God their rent checks don’t bounce before payday. We’re talking people like Cathy Ewing, who suddenly found herself flying backward in a flash of red and waking up five minutes later half blind with pain.

We’re talking violence, an American tradition.

You remember Cathy. She was with her sister in a McDonald’s restaurant on Ventura Boulevard one sunshiny afternoon for a quick lunch on a workday. A man named David Webster was there, too. Cathy is 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weighs 120 pounds. Webster is about 6 feet tall and weighs 180 pounds.

He was smoking in a non-smoking section and she asked him to stop. Cigarette smoke makes her ill. She’s a mild, almost girlish woman of 28, a mother and a reborn Christian, with a manner more hesitant than assertive.

A woman with Webster responded by pouring a Coke over Cathy’s sister. Cathy followed them into the parking lot to ask for an apology. Webster spun her around and hit her full in the face with his fist.

She was knocked six feet across the asphalt and woke up on her back between two parked cars, screaming the name of her son. She thought she’d been in an accident. Her face was left bruised and swollen. Doctors told her if the blow had been an inch to the right, she’d be dead.

Webster was convicted of assault and will be sentenced later this month. He’ll be on the streets again before the next Olympics.

“Because of my faith I bear the man no hate,” Cathy was saying the other day in the living room of her modest Simi Valley home. There are still dark bruise-shadows under both eyes. She gets headaches often.

“But, unless you’ve been the victim of that kind of violence, you’ll never know how hard it is to forgive . . .”

The sudden, brutal nature of the assault has scarred her. The wail of a siren brings back her own surrealistic ride to the hospital, like the blurred memory of a child’s scream.

“It’s almost unreal,” she says, sitting on the edge of a chair, half listening to the sound of a car on her quiet cul de sac, wondering if Webster might come looking for her.

“When I talk about it now it’s like I’m talking about another person. It’s hard to put myself in my own shoes. But every now and then . . .

“Well, I was walking down the street once and noticed four men walking toward me. I froze. They were laughing and talking. There was nothing threatening about them.” She stands, paces, sits again. “But I couldn’t move-- I literally couldn’t move --until they had passed.” Her year-old son cries from another room. She tends him, then returns. There is anguish in her tone. “Lord, I don’t want to have nightmares the rest of my life.”

Nightmares are what it’s all about. I have friends who walked into their house one evening and found someone waiting. They had never seen him before. He asked nothing from them. He simply tied them up, cut their throats and left. Their bodies recovered. Their way of looking at life never will.

You hear that we’re becoming a violent society. The same people who have made Clint Eastwood a millionaire and “Miami Vice” the hottest show on television like to say that. They shake their heads, wring their hands and blame crime on the devil, or at least on the Democrats.

Hell, we’ve always been a violent society. We were born that way. We’ve just never grown out of it.

Take John Wayne. Old quick-draw.

In Orange County, they named an airport after him. In Beverly Hills, they dedicated a statue. Bumper stickers say, “God Bless John Wayne.” Why? Because he was an actor who turned the rattle of gunfire into a national march.

We cheer a man who shoots four kids in a New York subway, swear by our God-given right to bear arms, then wonder why John Kennedy was killed and Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and Ronald Reagan was almost killed.

We’re a nation fascinated by pain, transfixed by death, in love with violence.

“I used to like boxing,” Cathy Ewing says. “I knew more about boxing than most men. I watched every bout during the Olympics. Now, I can’t bear to watch it. I hear the whack “--she slaps a fist into her palm--”and it all comes back.”

But still . . .

I ask her about guns. “Oh, I’m not against guns,” she says cheerfully. “I’m for people defending themselves. If we don’t have guns, criminals will.”

Oh, my God.