JFK was a real black belt…

JFK was a real black belt…

For some odd reason people have attached an entity to Karate that just doesn’t exist. As if just knowing this person(karate), whatever that means in the first place, imbues the individual with super powers. What this has done is lead many people to claim Karate as ineffective, just a dance, etc… and rightly so. But I would argue that most people who believe in Karate live in a delusional world of magnificant proportions anyway. Think saturday morning cartoon 70’s kung fu flick type of delusions. If you spend more than 5 minutes on internet forums, or youtube videos dealing with Karate, or just about any martial art, you know what I’m talking about. Everyone is an expert, everyone does the “real” thing, and everyone does a “better” style and can rip your brain out through your navel with their little toe. The one common thing with all these people? They believe in that weird entity. If they are a Boxer they believe in the boxing entity, wing chun ,the wing chun entity, karate, the karate entity, it’s the same in any method of emtpy hand fighting. Not only do they fail to see they rely on this entity for confidence in their style, they rely on this entity to prove their most often negative opinions on other styles.

Your black belt is not my black belt and mine is not his or hers or his or his or hers or ours either. It’s yours. It’s mine. It’s his, and it’s hers. For instance, 10 people take a 10 question certification test, each question is on an entirely different subject and competence in each of those subjects is dependent on knowing the proper answer. A passing score is 70%. All 10 people got 8 out of 10 questions right, or 80%. The first person got questions 1-8 but missed 9 & 10, the second missed 1 & 2 but got 8-10 right. The third got 1-4 right, 5&6 wrong, and 7-10 right. Starting to see the point? All of them passed certification, all of them are competent in 8 out of 10 subjects, but not one of them is fully competent, you could easily argue that each person has a different certification. Together they are the entirety of what certification represents, but alone, they are only certified in what they truly know. If this were Karate, and the test covered 10 techniques and you needed 7 of 10 to recieve your black belt, would you have earned the same black belt as any of the other 9 individuals that also took the test? My entire point is simply this, your karate is just that, your karate. There is no spirit being of Karate that follows you every second of every minute to make sure “karate” works for you. It is up to each and every single individual to nurture themselves so that Karate does not work for you, but you make Karate work. And that is why JFK was a real black belt…

“And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Kata accentuates “your” Karate the most. Which is wholly interwoven with self preservation and self development, two strands of the same cloth, character. While I feel the original meaning behind the oft qouted Funakoshi, “perfection of character” statement, has been lost in translation. I believe what it has become is greater than it would have been. And if I’m wrong, then I’m still right, right? Anyhow, if you’re like me and the politics of mainstream martial arts and the seemingly inescapable personalities/experiences from the competition “scene” of traditional martial arts makes you feel gross. Then there is probably nothing more satisfying than knowing every step, every repeition, every nuance you tweak improves your Karate. YOUR Karate.