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April 13, 2003 Are we looking for fights? Many years ago, my Aikido instructor warned me that there was a great problem in the study of martial arts: karate, kung fu, ju-jitsu and the rest. "The problem," he said, "is that you have to constantly train and practice, so, many times, all you think about is fighting. As that becomes the focus of your thinking, you find yourself constantly looking for or drawn into fights." In other words, the continual pursuit of skill in fighting has a tendency to lead to the continual pursuit of fighting itself. I wonder, with our few military enemies and our huge military budget if, as a nation, we're not following down that path my instructor warned about. When you constantly prime, equip and train your huge military, do you have a tendency to start constantly looking for ways to use that capacity? His view of Aikido was that it was useful because you were, at worst, constantly looking at how to avoid fighting and how to quickly cease fighting even when fighting could not be avoided. Is there a large-scale version of this kind of thinking that we could apply to our own defense? We changed the War Department to the Defense Department in 1947 and yet we keep fighting wars far, far away from our home shores. HART WILLIAMS |
