Thread: Armor! Or not.
View Single Post
Old 06-19-2012, 04:18 AM   #6
Anthony Loeppert
Dojo: Aikido of Del Mar
Location: San Diego, CA
Join Date: Aug 2010
Posts: 155
United_States
Offline
Re: Armor! Or not.

Quote:
Chris Parkerson wrote: View Post
Armor or not?

Amor or not??

Last April, my crew and I were doing security for an engineer's strike. It was quite aggressive.
Picture this: The decible (noise) level was equal to LAX airport's tarmac. metal gongs, whistles and drums filling the air for 10 hours a day. Police are doing nothing about it.It is also windy and a frigidly cold San Francisco day.

The client asks one of my video specialists to walk off property to record several knives (illegal at a strike) that were being weilded in a rally of about 300 strikers. There were 10 of my agents at this specific point of protection and the tasking did not go through me. I was unaware of it as I was handling another issue.

This Samoan fellow in the photo is one of the ring leaders. He flanks my video agent and clocks him on the head with a picket sign whose wood had been sharpened for improved cutting impact. My agent doesn't budge.

I notice the incident as it was happening and walk out to provide a flanking support for his work.
Another agent takes this photograph. The video is even more explicit as the picketer is waving double signs near my head and even behind my head as he enters past Maii.

I smile and offer tonglin (meditation of compassion/love and energy alchemy). But my body doesn't forget its instinctive knowledge of angle, zone and critical distance from many years of eskrima bouts. The trick is to hide these skills so that your body does not reveal any defensiveness. I give myself a "B" grade in this photo.
I commend how you commented on this post yet also made it about yourself. I wonder about your business... the business of protecting people. In my everyday experience, people who live respecting others need no protection. As in, no one is pissed at them... Something like what you said in another thread, "that which has substance..."

This is of course excluding people assassinated for their unpopular (though power challenging) beliefs. Perhaps you only protect them. Do you have a set of standards as to who and what you will provide protection to?

Last edited by Anthony Loeppert : 06-19-2012 at 04:23 AM.
  Reply With Quote