Speaking of Krav Maga

I went to a birthday party on Saturday.  

I love parties.  I am a social butterfly.  I love social lubricant.  However, I am old and careful, and dare I say, responsible.  I was on call last weekend and I have been called too often in the evening, so I took the high road and became the designated driver.  

This is a predicament for me.  If I'm not drinking I get a little fidgety and end up not really enjoying myself.  Luck found me and I became the bartender for the evening.  So I was able to drink by proxy, as it were.

Through the course of the evening I was able to meet a great deal of people, but I also saw them get blurrier and blurrier as time progressed.  One of the folks at the party was a guy from Israel fresh off six years with the IDF where he practiced Krav Maga the whole time.  

He noticed my costume with the gi top (I was dressed as zombie hunter and posted my resume on my back) and he obviously felt that simpatico that a lot of beer can bring on.  So for the next two hours he had to discuss his philosophy with me.  After the first 20 minutes I realized this was going to be agonizing  - no one was going to rescue me. The problem was the repetition of the stories.  Sometimes he would slip in a bit interesting info, but it was mostly the same thing over and over again.  

Barring the drunk babble, I was able to extract these similarities in practice to TSD:

- Always close in on your opponent.
- Shorter folks have an advantage.
- Strike at the knee, if the guy that can't walk he can't chase.
- Never, ever use your skills; unless you have no choice.
- You always have a choice.
- Every moment is a moment to reduce escalation.
- Every moment is a moment to get away.
- You can eat insult and take a punch, but if you main or kill it's forever on your head.
- If you get into a fight you take responsibility for you and your opponent.  
- Always treat your opponent as if they are an expert. 

It just dawned upon me that these are things we should be repeating in class once in awhile.  I'd say that the incident of conflict for anyone is pretty much nil, but it's nice to cover philosophy of practice once in awhile.