Attacks vs Fist Fights & Posturing Part 3

Continued from “Attacks Vs Fist Fights & Posturing Part 2”

An example is a car screeched to a stop and out poured 4-5 guys running to attack me. I was in the wrong part of town and stood out like a sore thumb. The attack was most likely racially motivated but could have easily happened for other reasons as well as I was leaving a job where I was dressed very nicely in a suit in a very poor and financially depressed area of town in a large inner city area. I have had a knife pulled on me about 5 times. Fortunately, only one of these were a direct physical assault and most of them were what I like to call “show and tell” verbal assaults. The interesting thing is that in most of the knife assaults were multiple attacker situations where one person held the knife and threatened while others with them watched and backed them up. The bad news is that fairly common street tactic is for the group to hold you down while the person with the knife stabs you to death. By being aware of my surroundings only in the first of these attacks (which happened when I was 12 years old) did the attackers actually get within reach of me. Fortunately, it was only a robbery and I gave them my money and stuff and they were satisfied. For me this event was pivotal in my personal development of awareness and I was not ever caught that unaware or unprepared again. Eventually I grew up, graduated from college and moved away from the bad neighborhoods I grew up in but then for many years I lived and worked in Tampa Florida while it was the number 4 worst crime city in America. Eventually, I moved to a rural area with less crime and less people. Not a luxury everyone can afford and if they could then, of course, eventually the crime would follow them.

I realized at a very young age that if attacked by someone who would kill me in order to get a few dollars for drug money I would have to be willing to fight for my life and that it might mean seriously injuring or killing them to stop them. A person who is high might be seriously wounded and have a life ending injury and yet keep attacking without any realization of how seriously bad off they are. If you assume they will stop and they don’t it is possible that the attacker just might take you to the grave with them. In our style of martial arts Clear’s Silat based on Pentjak Silat, Kun Tao and Kun Tao Silat we work very hard to avoid and non-violently end confrontations but when lethal force is necessary against violent street lethal attackers we do not pretend that there is some humane way to end the situation. We try to get away as fast and early as possible. If it is not possible to get away then we do the maximum amount of damage in the absolute shortest amount of time possible with the goal being to get away and in our style of martial arts we practice exiting and getting away after any serious technique as the escape is the goal and the damage we inflict is simply one very serious tool in our arsenal to accomplish this end. This is the only way to survive against serious multiple attackers who will kill you and beat you to death without hesitation and then laugh about it later over Malt Liquor or shots of whiskey/tequila while smoking some crack. Criminals do not believe in a fair fight and they hope the intended victim does as it is an incredible advantage to them in a real situation. Hopefully you will be good at awareness and avoiding bad situations but if you are seriously attacked play to survive not to be friendly or fair to a hardened criminal who would think nothing of killing you or your loved ones.

Clear’s Silat is the personal mix of Street Tactics, Pentjak Silat, Kun Tao and Kun Tao Silat devised by Richard Clear a practitioner of the arts for over 30 years. The art is based around surprise attacks by multiple attackers who are armed with weapons particularly blades and sticks such as baseball bats and utilizes avoidance and awareness techniques as well as physical tactics that are designed to immediately end a physical assault.