PERSPECTIVE: Being Marine

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The Marines teach and train you to be independent, courageous and a can-do anything type of person. Yet, the true essence of a can-do Marine is doing the job with a sense of unity, brotherhood and comradeship with other Marines. In short, team-effort all the way. They teach you to have unlimited confidence in yourself while fostering a comradeship and esprit-de-corps with our Marine Brothers. 

Yes, a Marine has the confidence, ability and attitude that says they fear no one and fear nothing and can-do anything that could be misconstrued as a stand alone mind set that could, if the training were not comprehensive and realistic, set a Marine into thinking they can-do it all themselves. 

Karate is like this in that training leads the karate-ka to believe in themselves to a point where they may garner an attitude that speaks to them thusly, "I can go where I want; I can do what is my right to do; I am fully capable in handling anything!" They are not taught how to make what they are trained to do with the additional Marine concept of brothers working together as a unified wholehearted team to get-r-done, relying on one another to achieve the Marine objective while maintaining a level of independence, confidence and can-do attitudes that make the Marines... Marines! The Marines truly understand that no Marine is an island, the reality is the cohesive brotherhood of Marines is what makes Marines... Marines!

This is why karate would better achieve its objectives, emphasis on self-protection using our karate skills, if we taught how to rely on others as well as ourselves to achieve our goals. In this way, through the collective brotherhood of karate-ka, we learn to apply not just our karate skills but those of the group to achieve success in self-protection. 

Yes, there is the cooperation of karate-ka in things like drills and there is still the end lesson of the individual applying the skills solo rather than in the group collective. For instance, never ever even at the highest level of skill ability should a karate-ka expose themselves to dangers in an environment; never every even at the highest level of skill shall a karate-ka project attitudes that would exacerbate conflict except in an effort to avoid or deescalate if needed. 

A Marine in combat is trained to take not just his Marine brothers into account to achieve a mission, they are to take those who are in the environment of the combat mission into account and that means as to the positive and negative, i.e., threat or non-threat, etc. It is this collective mind-set to the group, socially or personal group, that must be trained, practiced and applied because it is only through the group that we survive.

If we temper our egoistic tendencies when one achieves higher levels of skill, ability and attitude then we can avoid those mistakes allowing us to recognize when attitudes and ego's and status, status-seeking, tendencies rise up from our emotionally driven monkey brains so that we can protect self, protect our group, protect the social collective and successfully traverse the mine-field that is the social and legal systems. 

You don't have to be a Marine to understand and develop this kind of personality and character, but it doesn't hurt so consider becoming a Marine, as long as you recognize the possibilities that come from such effort and make your training, practice and application a well-rounded fully capable system of karate and self-protection.


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