Most of us know Joe Corley as the man who started the famous “Battle of Atlanta” martial arts tournament. He also runs several very successful martial arts schools, and shares his knowledge with other NAPMA members about how to “get there” and how to “do it.”
When I talked with Mr. Corley recently, we didn’t discuss “how to run a school,” but the public school shootings that have occurred across the country. This problem has become a major social issue.
Mr. Corley remarked that today’s kids are essentially taught, “nothing is worth fighting for.” More to the point, he felt that this philosophy had tragically failed both them and society. I must agree.
When I was in middle school and high school, there were more guns available to most of my classmates and me than I imagine are available to most school kids, today. Sure, we had fistfights, and even a bit worse, but those incidents never escalated to mass shootings and killings.
So, this problem simply can’t be blamed on the red herring of “guns.” There have always been plenty of guns, but not these deadly school shootings. So, what has changed?
What have changed are the minds and psyches of those very few kids who used guns to such deadly effect on their classmates. Now, let me try to explain why Mr. Corley’s remarks about “worth fighting for” reminded me of a social philosophy. A philosophy that I think has contributed to that deadly change in the mental attitudes of those very few homicidal school kids.
“When we tell a kid that ‘nothing is worth fighting for’, then we are also telling that child that he or she is not worth fighting for either. The underlying message that some kids will hear is that they are not valuable enough as individuals ever to justify their fighting over any situation. In effect, when parents or educators say, “Nothing is worth fighting for,” they are telling kids, “You just don’t count.”
Well, some adolescent males (with strange, new, raging hormones) will strongly revolt against that message. Indeed, a disturbed few will become truly obsessed driven to show the whole world, and in an unmistakable manner that they do count.
So, what better way to demonstrate that obsession than to murder a bunch of classmates, and then maybe go out blazing themselves? After all, if you tell a kid that he is not “worth fighting for,” then you are telling him that he’s worthless. So, if his life is worthless, then how much more “worthless” is others’ lives? Clearly, others’ lives have even less value than his own does.
This disturbed logic is part of why it becomes possible for that kid to “gun down” his classmates, and even to laugh while he goes about it. Just as if it was a video game.
In effect, when parents or educators say, “Nothing is worth fighting for,” they are telling kids, “You just don’t count.”
Mr. Corley related to me that if two kids start a fistfight at school today, nobody cares who “started it.” After all, the schools teach, “Nothing is worth fighting for.”
It wasn’t always so. We are now paying the price for failed social experiments in our schools and elsewhere. We’ve abandoned what for generations were some basic “working rules” for and limitations on behavior. When we teach kids that “nothing is worth fighting for,” then we not only remove all behavioral limitations for some of these already disturbed kids, but also we more subtly damage the pride and self-worth of so many more by telling them that “You are not worth fighting for.”
There is certainly nothing new in the idea that we can’t teach kids to respect others until we first teach them to respect themselves. A philosophy based on “nothing’s worth fighting for” simply defeats that objective from the very start.
At age 12 and as the “new kid at school,” I encountered the class bully (twice my size), who called my mother a foul name and knocked me into the dirt. My father and mother had taught me to respect others and myself. I was also taught that I was worth fighting for, however-if I was forced to do so.
I almost had to jump in the air to reach the bully with my punch to his face. When I did, he folded and began crying. The teacher then ran quickly to where we were fighting and sternly demanded to know what had happened. I was mad and shouted, “He called my mom @#%&.” The teacher turned to the bully and said, “Bob, you must learn that you can’t talk that way about someone’s family.”
She did not tell me, “Nothing was worth fighting for.” It was not only the best thing for my social development, but also it was the best sociological lesson for the “bully Bobs” of this world, too.
Believe me, there are things worth fighting for.
Peyton Quinn is an author, a multi-art Black Belt and the founder of Rocky Mountain Combat Applications Training (RMCAT). He has become internationally renowned as a teacher of teachers for his unique self-defense program, which is based on adrenal stress conditioning and scenario-based training.
