Hate is Good?

Last month, I went shooting and I checked out a self-defense class.

Lessons I learned:

If someone points a gun at you, RUN... it's hard to keep your target unless you are a really good sharp-shooter.

and...

Being able to defend myself is going to take more than a few classes. It is all muscle memory. Like learning music, nothing will play out right unless you practice A LOT...

G. attended Krav Maga with me and we left with our respective opinions of the class. After practicing our punches with partners who were holding practice pads, we closed the hour with two 30 second sessions of pelting a bag that each person had to straddle.

Having just one 30 second go at punching was surreal and by the time I was at my second punching go, I had to stifle myself from breaking out into laughter. Being aggressive to throw punches on my bag felt very strange and I started to wonder...

Would I be assertive enough to protect myself should I come upon a situation that demanded my wits? Fight or flight? At this junction, I'd probably hope that I had enough space to run.

G. tapped into her anger and found she had a lot of it and aired that taking a self-defense class would not be good for her. She doesn't want to find out how angry she is.

But I disagree over the anger issue. I don't think anger will necessarily generate a strong student in self-defense. Anger makes people lose focus and grace.

I watched a student struggle with Beethoven the other night while wearing anger glasses. As her frustration sought to make sequences of notes run, she lost playing smoothly and clearly. Her timing became erratic and she forgot notes and got sloppy.

Studying self-defense where vision is filtered by anger and frustration would seem to lead to one's precision and focus compromised..... I want to study a martial "art" and art is more than a mood.

Nonetheless, G's encouragements and mantra of "hate is good" is a fascinating perspective. Not wishing to box her statement as diabolical, we pursued the topic on a philosophical level.

Hate on a basic level is simply an awareness of an aversion that causes one to withdraw. The mere word is controversial. Society seems to have defined it narrowly and a caller voiced his concerns that I was professing a call to hate... and assumed that I embraced violence.

If you hate bees, does that mean you are bent on annihilation of buzzing populations? If you love pizza, are you marrying it?

How sophisticated is our emotional library? If we are wise enough to say love is a complex word, is it not fair to also say that of hate?

JNET