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Old 04-18-2012, 08:10 AM   #25
Alberto_Italiano
Join Date: Dec 2009
Posts: 296
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Re: Politics, the Death of Martial Arts?

Quote:
Karl Arant wrote: View Post
(...) Besides, if you really want to be the baddest dude (dudette) on the block, be a Navy Seal. Simple as that. (...)
All posts in this thread make sense to me.
Yours was very long but I managed to read it all (and anyway I'm at times a verbose guy as well lol).

But I would like to address this statement of yours, and I want to do this because your statement holds some remarkable truth,

Of course, it should be premised that if our only choice is that between being Seals or (I use one of your words) "dudettes", we're truly in dire straits because we're all bound to be dudettes then

However, my point is another.

Are you aware that those who are more acutely aware of how much Aikido lacks in martiality, may be exactly those who came to Aikido from another very martial path (not necessarily Seals, however a very martial sport or "art")?

In shorter words, and to follow your metaphor: a Seal would be precisely one of the type of persons that would realize immediately how unrealistic most of our Aikido is.
So, maybe the reason some "complain" derives not from the fact that they weren't Seals, but precisely that they were.

Combat (not referring to war scenarios here, anyway), once been in it, produces an incredibly strong nostalgia. Only who has been there, perhaps, may understand this and what I am speaking of. You're permanently changed.

You can rationalize how much as you want, but if you meet a guy with that type of nostalgia, he will simply insist with his (arguably futile) attempts to reproduce realism in the new scenario too, because having been there s/he is utterly unable to reconcile him/herself with fictional scenarios.
It's a psycholgical thing that gets ingrained in you, once you have been visited by realistic fights. It's like a rustled weapon and you hold it and cry over it remembering how great it was - and how useless it is now and how it is decaying, and yet you yearn all the time of a chance to revive it, to recover it, to be there once again...

So, when they cannot be "seals" anymore, they may happen to show up in one of our dojos, because they are driven by their nostalgia.

ps I'm no Seal and not even anything remotely close to that - just borrowing your metaphor for my thought/reply.

Last edited by Alberto_Italiano : 04-18-2012 at 08:18 AM.
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