From our early years we are taught everything. You name it and we have a class on it. It could be art, home economics, math, or English. And while all these things are great – they’re an absolute must – there is no requirement for children (or men or women, young or old) to take a class to learn situational awareness, real self-defense, and how to defend themselves and survive an actual attack. Now take this into consideration because, on a daily basis, who do we interact with? Other people.
Let’s look at our priorities. When you’re at a shopping center and you make a major purchase – let’s say an appliance, or a new iPod – and you spend a couple hundred dollars, the individual across the counter asks you, “Would you like to put insurance on this? It’s only 16 (or 30, or 40,200) dollars a year.” And inevitably a lot of us will say, “Yes, absolutely.”
I want to insure my material items. I want to insure my car, I want to insure my house, I want to insure everything around me. However, we grow up in a society where we interact with people every day, we see crime in the news, we read about it in the papers, and we hear about it from others without becoming paranoid, without waking up and looking over our shoulders every day.
Not that you have to carry paranoia with you to be heads-up about self-defense, safety, and personal situational awareness. This is the most important aspect of the mindset of self-defense. However, from the time you get up until the time you go to bed, you interact with other human beings. What on this planet do we worry about when it comes to self-defense? Other human beings.
Yet there’s no requirement to learn how to defend ourselves, to understand what a threat is, to learn how to get out of a dire, desperate situation. And I’m talking about desperate as in being in the back of a car or in a locked room with an attacker who is overpowering you, all the way down to a schoolyard bullying situation with two young kids. Where do we learn what to do about this?
We don’t. No one says we have to. So we go through life thinking, “It’s not going to happen.” We hope, and we believe that we can put ourselves in the right place, and that people will be there for us. Yet we see it on the news all the time. You don’t have to watch the news for more than an hour to see three or four people being victimized.
We tend to disassociate ourselves from the people we see or read about in the news. They’re not real because we don’t know them, and we haven’t attached anything to them emotionally as far as “Hey, that could happen to me.”
Instead we should say, “Hey, you know what, I don’t want that to ever happen to me. Because this was in a good neighborhood, they drove nice cars, they made a lot of money. And they did not know their attacker and they became the victim of this brutal individual.”
Now does that mean that if you take a self-defense class – if you take a seminar that is just absolutely empowering and gives you five tips or strategies to survive a situation – does that mean that you’ll never become a victim? Absolutely not. And if there’s an instructor or an organization or a program out there that preaches “If you do this, you will always be safe” or “If you do this move, guess what, you will always win” – that’s nonsense. We’re talking about the 90 percent. We want to go for the 90 percent
effectiveness rate when it comes to protecting ourselves, our loved ones, and our families.
It could be just some teenage girl or teenage boy who gets beat up after school. They put themselves in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and at the mercy of their attacker. Guys, it can be absolutely anything, from the lowest priority of self-defense to the highest priority, from a bullying situation to a weapon involved, from a domestic situation to a multiple attacker situation. It really doesn’t matter. Education is of the
utmost importance.
And you have to remember, once you’ve been in a situation, hindsight is 20/20. We begin to say stuff to ourselves like, “I wish I would have taken a class. Well, now I’m going to take a class” or “That’s never going to happen to me again. I will never let that happen again. I’m going to get a concealed weapons permit. I’m going to take martial arts. I’m going to take a self-defense class.”
Let’s not be reactive. Let’s be proactive. This is empowering. Instead of only
insuring our washers, our driers, our homes – which these are all important and they must be insured, absolutely – let’s start thinking about ourselves. Let’s insure our most important asset – ourselves.
I’m going to go ahead and give you an example.
We all do this every day. I did it on the way here. We drive a vehicle. And why, predominantly, do we get insurance on vehicles? It’s not because we’re going to go out there and wreck our car. Correct? I mean, that’s what we like to think. I’m not going to jump into my vehicle and ram it into a wall or into another car. At least that’s what I hope I won’t do. We buy insurance because we are worried about the other person. Someone might hit me, run into me, be driving under the influence and smash into my brand-new
vehicle – and I want it replaced. I want it done correctly, and I need peace of mind.
So we spend all this money and this energy. Throughout the U.S. and in many countries it’s mandatory that if you own a vehicle you will have insurance. Which goes back to the question of why do people walk around and we don’t have a self-defense system implemented in the school systems? It’s not mandatory that your child will sit down and crack open a book and start learning about who the bad guy is, what he thinks, what can he do to you. That he’s not the guy in the dark alley with the long trench coat, he’s not the boogieman, he’s not the guy you see on TV, he’s not the guy knocking on the door begging to get in. The bad guy looks like you and me.
There are only three types of bad guys.(we cover them in this book) We’ve
basically determined that there’s no other type of individual outside the parameters of the three types of bad guys which are covered in the C.O.B.R.A. Self-Defense Program.
They can be classified in many different ways, but generally they’re going to fall into three types of individuals.The Bully , The wolf and the Predator.
This knowledge is lifesaving. I wish the kids knew it. I wish the young females knew it. I wish the males knew it who walk around and think, “You know what? I’m a pretty in-shape guy. I took a couple classes. There’s no reason anyone’s going to really victimize me.”
Hey, guess what – you might have a very nice car and two guys with a long rap sheet are across the street staring at you. Maybe they’re on probation. Maybe they broke out of jail. Maybe they just don’t care. They’ve put the bull’s-eye on you, and guess what, in thirty minutes from now they’re planning to take your very nice car. They’ll do whatever they have to do to get it, and drive it all over the state, or all over the county, and just joy ride. And if you’re in their way, guess what, you are the victim.
So it really doesn’t matter. People with experience, people with no experience. We can insure our life to the hilt with just general education and knowledge. It doesn’t have to be hitting a bag all the time. It doesn’t have to be, “I can do a hundred and fifty push-ups in twenty seconds and hit a bag harder than anyone.” That has nothing to do with reality training at all, and we discuss that in the article on Combat Conditioning. How what you do in an enclosed, controlled environment does not translate very well at all once you’re out there.
It’s not called street fighting, because most fights don’t happen in the middle of the street. It’s called real life situational training and self-defense.
We’re going to go one more step. I want you to just give me a couple minutes of your time. I want to give you an example and take you on a little journey here, if you can just stay with me, please.
If you had the crazy ability to time travel, first of all that would be outstanding. Second of all, we could complete this mission. You’re going to go ahead two years – six months, one year, two years, it doesn’t really matter. You’re going to crack open a newspaper or search the Internet, and you’re going to find that let’s say yourself, or your family, or someone very close to you became the victim of a brutal crime. Or maybe just an average crime. Maybe they were robbed, maybe they were murdered, maybe they
were raped, maybe they were just brutalized to the point where they were handicapped or it caused some kind of emotional distress that they’re going to live with for the rest of their life.
Now, because you have the ability to time travel, you go back to today, right now, which you just left. How much would you spend, and what would you do, to seek out self-defense training? What would you do to tip the scales in your favor? To change the ultimate outcome that you witnessed in the future?
Obviously none of us can time travel (that I know of). But having done this
exercise, you can imagine you went in the future two years, and you found that your mom was robbed, and they took her car and left her for dead and she didn’t make it. What could you have done to change that?
Now say you couldn’t stop her before she went out to the car. You can’t just
change time like that. But you could empower her with the fact that maybe she didn’t park in a well-lit parking area. Maybe she was jingling her keys. She left her car unlocked when she got in because she began to adjust the mirror. She was looking for something in the console. She made a phone call. She stayed in the parking lot twenty-five seconds too long, which gave an individual who was standing at the other end, who basically scouted
her out because she was the last one leaving, the opportunity to walk across the parking lot, open the car door, and carry out the plan that he wanted to carry out.
The education that she could have gotten over the last six months, year, or two years could have saved her life. She didn’t necessarily have to become a prize fighter, step out of the car, and whoop this individual. That’s not what we’re looking for. Because you’ve got to remember, self-defense isn’t about whooping somebody. It’s not about anything but living. Surviving. You can beat someone to a bloody pulp and you don’t get a title belt. You don’t get a trophy. You don’t get ten seconds on the news half the time.
On the other hand, if you lose, if they take your life, if they victimize you, you might get a ten-second spot on the news, if that. And guess who’s destroyed – everyone in your family, everyone close to you. And everything you ever worked for is gone via the hands of some thug, some criminal who made his plan just because he thought you were a weak target.
Time traveling. If we could do it, we could see the future and we would know “Hey, guess what, I might need this type of training. I might need to sign up for a class.” But because we don’t have this power, once again we just kind of shuffle it to the back.
It’s not going to happen to us.
You have to remember, it can happen to anyone. And let’s just go ahead and time travel. All right? Do this exercise for me and it will definitely open up your mind and expand what you think about as far as the potential hazards in this world.
