By Moshe Katz
Let's take a look at the martial arts. We have many traditionalists among us. A judo man will stick to judo, he will not dilute his judo with kicks or punches; he is a purist. A karate man will not go to the ground, nor will he put on boxing gloves and train with a boxer. A wrestler will not kick. Bruce Lee came along and said, really there is only one martial art. What you are seeing are just many different parts of one whole, it is time to put them all back together again. Real life self defense is not only kicking, or punching, or takedowns, or wrestling. Real life is all of the above.
When man first started fighting it was everything goes. That was the original "color". As time went on one school specialized in ground work while another perfected boxing or kicking. Yet another dealt with the art of pressure points. But in reality Lee said, they are all only parts of one original puzzle. That is the true color. The problem was that for so long we became accustomed to the red paint that was not real. It was just a way of preventing rust, and now that the real color has been restored it seems out of place, unnatural.
Bruce Lee, the UFC, Krav Maga, are all hitting on the same theme. The real color is the totality of fighting. Each martial art is but one school preserving and perfecting one limited aspect of this totality. It is time to reunite the pieces and recreate the whole.
We are very limited in our vision and in our perception. We are conditioned to see things as we are used to seeing them, even if it is not real, even if the color we are seeing is merely a preservative. True colors confuse us, they upset the apple cart. In life and in martial arts we need to be open to seeing real colors, even if they are sometimes confusing.
