"... and Never to Be ..."

At the beginning of every class, students in our karate school recite the Student Creed:

1) I intend to develop my self in a positive manner and to avoid anything that would impair my mental growth or physical health. 2) I intend to develop self-discipline in order to bring out the best in myself and others. 3) I intend to use the skills I learn in class constructively and defensively, to help myself and my fellow man, and never to be abusive or offensive.

I was thinking about this yesterday afternoon when I was watching two boys horsing around while waiting for ice cream at a local dairy bar. The boys were about ten and twelve, I think, and probably brothers. Just to kill time, they started trading "martial arts" moves with each other - I put it in quotes because it didn't appear to me that either of them had ever had any formal training.

Well, as these things do, the situation escalated until the smaller boy stuck his fist in the air and the bigger boy stepped forward and hit himself in the mouth with it. All horseplay instantly stopped. I think if I hadn't been watching, the bigger boy might have cried. He did, however, run to his mother, who promptly sent the smaller boy to the car without any ice cream. Not fair! I wanted to tell her, but I gritted my teeth and kept my mouth shut.

Afterward, when I told my grandson about the incident, he was fascinated. "What do you think would have happened if I had been there?" he wondered.

"Well, if it happened at the karate school, like in the locker room, you could have stopped it right away," I said. "You're senior now, so you have the authority to tell them to knock it off."

"If they tried anything like that on me I could take them down with a wrist lock," he continued hopefully.

"That's only to be used as a last resort," I reminded him. "The first thing you do is remove yourself from the situation, remember?"

"Yeah," he acknowledged, and then went on to speculate about the fate of the boy who had the misfortune to land a punch.

There's something elementally appealing about testing our skills against other people. But a parking lot or a playground is never a good place for a tussle, even a friendly one. Much better to practice your skills in a supervised sparring match in the dojang.

Maybe instead of keeping my mouth shut at the dairy bar, I should have approached the mother and given her a card for the karate school. "Hey," I could say, "it looks like your boys might enjoy this."