People are Good

I believe on a fundamental level that all people are good. I also believe that on a fundamental level all people are also bad. I look at it as yin-yang - good-bad - where martial artists or anyone who either works in the field of protection of practices some form of protective system must see both sides of the coin of the human condition.

As MA's we must train ourselves to see this in everyone yet we must not allow one side or the other to to dominate one side or the other. If we see people as good and disconnect from the thought of seeing people as bad we can create an opening for bad people to make us a victim. On the other side of that coin if we tend to see everything as a dark cloud where we cannot see any silver lining then we would "see evil behind every tree and in every corner." This too is not a good way.

Sometimes it is necessary to allow evil into our lives simply so we can recognize it when it rears its ugly head. We as MA's and SD practitioners cannot bury our heads in the sand and hope it will bypass us - doesn't that make us a target, a victim?

Someone wrote once that they didn't realize that knowing and recognizing violence, violent persons, and other violent stuff was necessary to properly defend themselves. Reading it here may seem obvious yet most SD is taught mechanically and don't provide the knowledge to "see" and "hear" and "recognize" the various colors of violence.

When some read the books I have been promoting here they may say, "Oh, this is awful. Oh, this is never going to happen to me so why do I need to learn this stuff." I guess if one performs a self-analysis of their need to know SD then it may be true yet those who are MA's and who seek SD must understand this or it will not work in an attack.

Actually, there is no guarantee anything will work in a violent attack but not knowing about all its many faces is much, much worse.

I can say that many of my years of training and practice were not "complete" because I didn't understand many things such as the topic of violence, etc. I was actually geared toward the military combat view which here on the streets of America can get you in trouble for fighting or worse.

This is something to think about. If you practice traditional self protection in your MA, if you are training in SD for self protection, if you are considering a professional career as military, police, jail/prison guard, etc. then you really need to consider learning everything - both sides of the coin, yin-yang or good-bad or peaceful-predatory, and so on.