Last Friday morning I saw three teenage boys beating a teenage boy with their book-bags at Overlea Station. Nobody cared. Heads were not even turning. I took note briefly, sparing five seconds of my day to consider the boy’s plight. The bags were heavy enough that the boys were whirling them overhead with both hands and bending at the waste to deliver blows to the boy on the ground who was shrimping around trying to shield his head from his attackers. As the vehicle I was in passed I tried to recall the last time I recorded an act of violence that was not a predatory attack, but an actual fight.

Probably the worst thing about martial arts instruction, on a practical and cultural level, is the fact that these arts focus on confrontational set-piece "fights." Now, I have led a very hazardous life and have survived scores of criminal threats. But, since age 16, I have never engaged in a fight outside of a ritual sporting encounter. The fact that martial arts are taught as confrontational rituals has two disastrous effects: it encourages the punk street-fighter mentality among young martial artists, and it deludes self-defense students into thinking that they will be approached by someone asking to "fight."

No good can come of this type of psychological training. If a martial artist agrees to a street-fight that is bad enough, pure egotistical stupidity. A fight is not a self-defense situation, but a dominance contest. An attack is something that the defender cannot say no to, and it generally begins with a sneak attack.

From July 2010 thru March 2013 I only collected one account of an act of violence which was actually a contest. This incident took place in a dollar store between a small elderly man and a small middle-aged woman. The man was the defender and achieved a standing rear-naked choke. The heroics were broken up by a third party.

Every other Baltimore area act of violence that has come through the brutal clearing house of my mind, by way of verbal reports from fellow Harm City denizens fall into the predation classification. Imagine my surprise yesterday, Saint Patrick’s Day, when I happened across Aleck and Vino in the brownstone ghetto, and was regaled by Vino:

“So, yesterday, my friend, he wants me to help his son out. His boy is a good kid, hangs with the black kids—good buddies with one. But there’s a beef over a girl. So the other kid has got two friends and they’re goin’ to bust him up behind my store. I walk up and confront them, to find out what the fuck is going on, and eight more of these fuckers come out of the woodwork. I told them, ‘Look, none of you are eighteen, so I go to jail for laying a hand—so I will fucking kill you. If I’m goin’ down, I’m goin’ down for you don’t even want to know what.’

“Well, he has one black friend, and the black kid that is into the same girl has seven friends. So I’m like, ‘Look, this is going to be a fight, him and him. Anybody jumps in and I’m fucking dropping bodies.’

“So Jimmy, they’re all cool with it. The fight goes down in the alley behind the store and my friend’s boy brought it—fuckin’ kid could crack. The other kid is a big boy, fit, quick—and bam! A straight left and his fuckin’ eye was out to here. It didn’t take long after that. I didn’t let any dirty shit go down on the ground.”

Then this one kid says, “I want his father!”

I’m like, ‘Get the fuck out of here. What is a matter with you? Go, get. This was a decent thing, don’t ruin it.’”

“You know, there was a time, you me, we have a difference we take care of it ourselves, then go have a beer. But these kids have no concept of fighting. They fuckin’ need a U.N. peacekeeping force just to have a fight that doesn’t turn into a stomping.”

Well, there you go: a Harm City fight refereed by a guy that grew up on an alien planet, where a teenager’s first violent answer was something less than a group stomping.

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