PICTURE this, you are walking on a street at around 1 in the morning, only a dimmed light guiding your way with many dark corners to pass, exhausted from work or going home from a night out when, suddenly, someone suspicious from 50 meters is standing beside a post.
Due to fatigue and lack of sleep, you cannot determine if it is a man or a woman, or if he is alone or with someone. But with the little amount of consciousness, you are thinking to yourself, is it just one person or two or God knows how many of them and what are they doing there at this unwanted hour.
What must you do?
Out of paranoia and safety, the situation at hand is dictating danger. But then again, what will you do?
Danger chooses neither gender nor age nowadays as crimes are committed against anyone such as hold-up, mauling, murder, or molestation that sometimes leads to rape.
These crimes start from confrontations and, once it gets out of hand, leads to another from minor to the worse crime unimaginable.
So, what could prepare you for this type of situation? Learning self-defense, they say. What kind? What type? Etc. etc.
People seek to learn how to fight as their understanding of self-defense, but it is not.
Self-defense is learning the attitude and discipline. Violence is the last thing about self-defense and advocating peace is true self-defense.
How about bad people doing bad things you may ask. Oh, yes! they deserve a beating alright but instead of hurting people, why don’t we give them the opportunity not to commit the crime?
In the given situation, it could be hard.
Because you are already there and either you turn back and walk away, which does not assure you that they would not go after you or you can gamble and pass hoping and praying that they are good guys.
This only means that self-defense should not be provided by just the individual. While learning fighting skills for self-defense, situations will not always favor a one on one encounter, criminals always have a weapon at hand.
As a martial artist, I advocate that people should learn martial arts or fighting skills to at least prepare them in this kind of situation. Although it is not a sure solution, at least there is a fighting chance of survival.
We have the right to live in a place of peace where we can enjoy our time and our environment without fear of being attacked.