As our beautiful summer does its best to hold off fall it is easy to forget that the season began with a terrible bang (more accurately, several bangs) with the shootings at Café Racer Espresso in the U District. While I didn’t know any of the victims, I had seen Joe Albanese & Drew Keriakedes perform, we had mutual friends and that was close enough to effect me. 

As the details of events began to emerge in the following days I was struck by the actions of one of the shooting’s survivor’s Mr. Lawrence Adams.  According to the accounts of witnesses, Mr. Adams distracted the shooter by throwing a barstool at him, allowing 2 to 3 people to escape.  Mr. Adams himself was miraculously unharmed despite his best efforts to get himself killed.

The Café Racer is the kinda place my family would frequent if we lived in the neighborhood ( we could use a cool place like that on the island) and this got me to thinking.  What would I do if I found myself in such a situation?  Would I run or would I stay and fight?  The police can’t be everywhere, and I wouldn’t want them to be, so what do you do during the response time? I decided I would probably have to stand my ground if for no other reason to buy my family some time. 

While events like the Café Racer are horrifyingly regular occurrences in the modern United States what really are the chances of being put to the test?  These things always happen someplace else next don’t they?  Well……

The situation I am going to describe is completely true and as such it is NOT nearly as dramatic, dangerous or tragic as the incident at Café Racer.  My actions were foolhardy and I wouldn’t recommend anybody try them for themselves.  However it is my story, it’s the only one of its kind I got and I’m sticking with it, at least until I have a better one to tell.

Anyway……

I was driving on Capitol Hill along Madison and I could see a couple walking towards me, pushing and shoving against each other in such a way that I couldn’t tell if they were playing around or if it was serious.  As I pulled parallel to them I got my answer.  Right there on the sidewalk in front of a window of a grocery store full of people, the male of the couple exploded on the woman, knocking her to the ground and standing over her delivering a flurry of blows while she was down.   I was less than 10 feet away. 

Any sane person would have called 911 and gone about their business.  Since nobody has ever accused me of being sane I stopped the car right there in the middle of Madison, jumped out and ran right into the middle of a ‘domestic disturbance’. 

Honestly there isn’t much to tell, as soon as he saw me coming he turned away from her and came at me. He put his hands around my throat and we tussled a little bit, but there wasn’t a fight.  She started screaming at him as soon as she was up and pulled him away from me and together they stumbled down the block like it didn’t happen.  However it did happen, I saw it and was dumb enough to get personally involved.  Eventually the police showed and the guy was arrested, I gave my statement to the police and that was that.

The event happening so quickly that everything I’ve learned from it has come in hindsight.  

I could lie and say something ‘noble’ spurred my reaction but in truth it was remarkably primitive & simple; ‘sexism’.  There was a man beating a woman on the street and that was just unacceptable. 

Had it been two men or two women going at it I probably would not have batted an eye, but a man hitting a woman pissed me off more than I thought it would have.  

I really wish I had some important or profound point to make to end this post but honestly I don’t.  I can’t recommend anybody else do what I did, but I can’t say don’t get involved beyond calling 911 either.

Other things I learned:

1. Society sucks.  Quite frankly I was taken back by the apathy of the other individuals that witnessed the assault.  Except for one store employee, only one other person, an elderly woman in the car behind me, offered to help the woman.  All the nearby pedestrians, and there was a bunch of them, did nothing.  I would have thought that once one individual jumped in herd mentality would take effect and others would have jumped in.  I was wrong.

2. I don’t own a weapon of any sort.  (That problem has been fixed btw).  This actually occurred to me as I was getting out of the car.  Nobody in the family plays baseball/softball, so no bat and I don’t think the little ninja’s shinai is gonna do much to slow down an attacker.  Do cars even come with tire irons anymore?

3. Cops can be pretty cool, when you’re on this side of an encounter.  Despite all the bad behavior from the SPD in recent history the guys I dealt with were professional and friendly. I guess being a cooperative witness vs being a suspect helps.  The pair that actually arrested the attacker were pretty restrained. The guy did resist and he probably earned himself a thump or 2.

On a side note, cop cars don’t have normal seats in back, but a molded plastic bench that is easy to hose off (and incredibly uncomfortable). I know this because it was where I had to sit while giving my video statement.

One beautiful afternoon last summer, the little ninja and I (or more correctly, the little Messi at that particular moment), stopped by the Park on the Lid to work on our soccer skills before heading down the hill for TKD.   We were going through our usual drills a little pass & run, some fancy footwork and shooting.   There was a goal set up and we were taking advantage of it.  Call me optimistic but I am reasonably certain that even casual observer would have been able to tell we were taking practice seriously and anybody who is familiar with the sport, say somebody who coaches a kids team, definitely would have known because the Iz was wearing her cleats and shin guards.

As we’re going through the drills I noticed a group of boys (10-12 yrs old) gathering on the edge of the field with one adult in tow.   I didn’t really pay too much attention to them because it’s a pretty big park and though we were using the goal, there was an unused one at the other end of the pitch.  So we’re going about our business when the aforementioned group of boys swarms the area we’re playing without as much as an ‘excuse us’ or any other such courtesy.

Switching immediately from soccer to martial arts mode, the little ninja took a defensive stance and in a move that would have made The Bride proud, delivered a spinning roundhouse kick to the head of the kid out front, dropping him like bad habit.  Without pausing to watch the kid crumple to ground, she nailed the 2^nd kid with a right jab to the nose.  Blood flew everywhere as his shrieks of pain alerted the rest of the little savages to the beat down that awaited them if they kept moving forward.  As they turned tail & ran she chased down the slowest of the pack and without hesitation delivered a flying kick to the mid back, surfing his torso as he fell forward then using the back of his head as a stepping stone for her opposite foot, driving his face into the mud as she kicked off to continue the chase.

Then I snapped out of my daydream as this cast of rejects from YTNw’s production of Lord of the Flies moved in and took over the field while we were playing without even acknowledging our presence.  It took only a moment for disbelief to turn to anger. It must have shown because the coach walked over and made some pithy comment.  Nothing rude to be sure but nothing that even came close to acknowledging what just happened. 

Contrary to popular belief we Italians can control our anger, its just we often choose not to.   I was pissed to be sure but I somehow concluded that going Chris Montisanti on this guy wasn’t gonna do either one of us any good, so I said just low enough so none of the kids could hear:

“Your kids just ran us off the field without the courtesy an excuse me or a piss-off and you let it happen. This would never happen with the kids from her tae kwon do class. You’re the adult here, do your job and lead by example”.  He had a ‘deer-in-the-headlights’ moment as he feebly tried to process what I said.  Clueless….

hm,If you’ve read this far congratulations! You have made to our 3^rd post in what has become an alliterative series of topics: coordination, confidence and

Common Courtesy

The little ninja, (linja? Kind of like a liger) started TKD when she was 3 and half years old and for the longest time that was our only interaction with other families.  If you spent anytime around the MIMA dojang and if you’re reading this you probably have, you’ve noticed no matter how energetic and boisterous things get, common courtesy rules the day. Well least amongst the students though the parent ain’t bad either….generally speaking.

After a couple of years it was time to expand the little one’s horizons and signed up for another activity.    I don’t remember if we were expecting the same level of civility from the kids or not, but wow what an eye opener.    Not only were the kids rude and dismissive to each other, the parents’ behavior wasn’t much better. This wasn’t the instructor’s fault; she is a tough ol’ bird that does not take crap from anybody in her studio.  (True story, she banned mothers and grandmothers from rehearsals for the recitals).   This pattern has been repeated other activities though usually not directly.  The Girl Scout troop is pretty well behaved and soccer team too (as well as a gang of giggling 8 year old girls can be anyways).  I can’t say the same for all the other troops and teams we’ve encountered. 

But at MIMA you can trust that your child will be treated in courteous manner but more importantly they will behave the same way.  Not just in the dojang either.  Whenever we’ve run into other TKD families outside the studio, the kids invariably behave the same way they would in the studio.  And if they aren’t, just threaten to tell one of the Masters they’re acting up, that will get their attention.

Welcome back for another insightfully riveting brain dump from the Tae Kwon Dad.  I want to give a big shout out to all the new Black Belts, and everybody else who moved a notch closer to their Black Belts and a thank you for providing me with the perfect segue to this week’s topic.

Confidence Earned Through Accomplishment

This is a true result from a recent survey conducted by Intel – 85% of U.S. high school students surveyed rated themselves as highly confident in their mathematical abilities (the highest rate of all the groups surveyed), yet actually we place 25th as a country in worldwide rankings. 

The only conclusions one could reach when trying to reconcile these numbers are: if those kids are right –they really are great at math—but its by No Child Left Behind standards and those standards are lower than the rest of the world’s (okay I’ll concede that given the source of NCLB this is a distinct possibility) or, and more likely, the vast majority of those kids are overestimating their math ability.    That false-confidence is not just in math skills either, more than one study shows a remarkable trait among young Americans: self-confidence rises as actual knowledge/skill decreases.  Let that sink in for a moment.  The less a person knows the more confident they are.

Now young people didn’t develop this inflated sense of self-confidence in a vacuum.   They had to learn it somewhere.  Fooled you!  You thought I was gonna go all Walt Kowalski on you with ‘damn-kids-these-days-with-their-damn-hip-hop-music!’ rant didn’t you?  Though it would be easier to take a ‘kids-these-days’ attitude, it’s not fair because children adapt to the world as it’s presented to them, bad music and all.

Whether it’s grade inflation in the Ivy League or graduation ceremonies for kindergarteners, adults have spent the last 40 years coming up with new ways to ‘celebrate mediocrity’ as Mr. Incredible points out.  Couple that with a media culture that applauds & rewards ignorance, it’s no wonder kids think that having the attitude of this pair of devil spawn  is preferable to knowing something, because sounding confident (and by extension preserving our oh so precious self esteem) has more value in our society than actually being knowledgeable.

Look at the current state of political discourse in this country. Being open-minded, well informed and having the ability to speak complete sentences is vilified as elitist, while being intellectually incurious, selectively informed, and mangling your words is considered ‘authentic’.   It’s not just pandering politicians and celebrities of dubious ‘talent’ that act this way either.  Spend even the briefest period of time on any social network, forum or comment section and you’ll see plenty of posts/threads that are nothing more than self affirming circles of willful misinformation where reality is an unwelcome intruder that has no place in the conversation.

I have to admit I am guilty of this too from time to time.  I just did a quick survey of my Id and it says that 94.8% of you skimming this will find it to be the most entertaining and informative piece of web debris you’ll read today.  The other 5.2% just doesn’t get it.

Even our clothes lie to us to make us feel better about ourselves.  At 5’7” and 150 lbs I am well under the national average size of an adult American male, yet somehow I wear Large T-Shirts?  If I’m a large, what size does CGN Simms wear? That dude is freekin’ HUGE.  It must be a Mega Max XXXL! For women the inverse is true but I am not gonna go into the details, I like my women friends and want to keep them. 

I’ve been rambling again haven’t I?

You might be asking yourself “What does this have to do with martial arts, and specifically MIMA Grandpa Simpson?”  Plenty I tell’ya.  From the first time a Little Dragon tests for their yellow belt to Master Strongheart’s next test for her 6^th Dan, each increment, every small step forward towards that black belt is EARNED.  Either you do the form(s) and break the boards, complete community service, and leadership projects, or you don’t.   The Masters aren’t going pass somebody because not passing will hurt that student’s feelings.  The confidence and pride a student feels each time they tie on their belt is EARNED and that’s the way it should be.

Last summer the little ninja wanted to earn her next belt before taking a month off to travel with her grandparents.  She spent a week in summer camp in order to take the belt test on Friday.  Friday came around and despite her hard work, she failed the test.  Was she disappointed?  Yes of course, but that is not the end of the story.  She knew she had another week and one last test she could take before leaving for vacation.   

She worked her tail off for the next week, attending classes every day, and the very next Friday she showed up to retake the belt test, much to the surprise of the Masters.  This time however she killed it, easily passing the test and earning her brown w/black striped belt.  Sure the Master’s could have taken pity on her and passed her the week before, but what would she have learned?  Being cute and wanting something is enough to achieve a goal?  That’s not much of a life lesson in my book.  I rather she fail, accept constructive criticism, work hard then come back and pass the test because of her persistence, determination and most importantly, because she made the effort. Every time she ties on her belt reinforces that experience.  That’s a life lesson worth learning. (And her snap-backs are much better for it too).

Until next time.

People are often surprised we chose to start our daughter training in martial arts at such a young age and they often ask why.  Given the myriad of benefits we’ve seen in our daughter, it made me realize that this is not a question that can be answered in a quick 2-sentence sound bite.   Over the next few weeks I will be writing a series of posts on the positive benefits of martial training (in no particular order) from a parent’s perspective.

Improved Coordination

I have terrible coordination.  Remember the kid who couldn’t pat his head & rub his stomach at the same time when they tested us in school?  Yes, that was me.  I couldn’t pass a field sobriety test right now and I haven’t had a drink in over a week. I also used to suffer from an affliction medical experts call ‘skinny white boy disease’ or in layman’s terms: ‘no rhythm’.  Fortunately working with musicians for 20 years helped with that, though I still tend to be a mess in everyday life.  If you’ve seen Ozzy Osbourne interviewed in the documentary ‘The Decline and Fall of Western Civilianization Part II, The Metal Years” you know what I am talking about.  Don’t believe me? Come on over for breakfast and a round of Dance Central 2. Beware I have been practicing “Nothin’ on You" and can kill it….on easy, and I make great blueberry-white chocolate chip pancakes.  Alas I digress………

Determined to save my daughter from growing up with the motor skills of Gerald Ford, we decided that martial arts would be an ideal activity to help mitigate her genetic clutzy-ness.  If hangin’ with bass players & drum machines could help me (I kid, there are still real drummers out there – whazz up Crackin’ the Skins Craig!) imagine what serious martial arts training, starting at a young age, could do for my daughter?  Sounds reasonable, right?

Has it worked?  Does she have the agility of a student at the Jackie Chan Boarding School for Preternatural Prodigies? No not quite, but she is only 7 yrs old so I’ll give her another year to get it together – or else!  Joking aside, she is definitely less accident-prone and more confident in her physical prowess than I ever was. There is nothing that she won’t climb, a ledge she won’t try to walk on and very little that’s too high to jump off of, all much to her mother’s dismay.  I am pretty sure she was the only person on her soccer team to score goals with her left foot this last season.   They were serious strikes too, not weak sauce kicks that managed to dribble their way past some non-martial arts doing goalkeeper.   To me that’s a pretty good indication that yes it has worked. 

So does martial arts training improve coordination?  To borrow a phrase from the Mythbuster’s , I’d have to say that this claim has been CONFIRMED.

See you next time.