I Come To You…With Empty Hands

By W. Hock Hochheim

Some thirty years ago, compelled by David Carradine's Kung Fu show and the movie Billy Jack, I wandered into a Karate school in Texas.

It was a tough place of Kenpo, hardcore karate, a place where kids dare not dwell. I was immediately mesmerized by the term painted on the wall in red paint: “I come to you with empty hands.” Inside the training notebooks carried the complete passage. Since those pioneer karate days, this motto has been a mantra of many karate systems.

“I come to you with empty hands, I have no weapons. But should I be forced to defend myself, my principles or my honor, should it be the matter of life and death or right or wrong, then here are my weapons - my empty hands.”

Weapons first! Empty hands last! Poetry, huh? It smacked to me back then a moral speech of ancient honor and samurai duels, of superior skill and expertise, of glorious battle. These are the teachings of the wise master-to-grasshopper. Remember though, even little kids pull the legs off bugs like grasshoppers to watch them suffer. And, some teenagers out there are playing with machetes. Fair play. Fair fighting? Glorious battle? Hmmmm.

You see now I am older and cynical, with some “been there/done-that” under my pistol belt and obi. I have seen the real world phrase, “always bring a gun to a knife fight” painted on a few walls, and in red blood, not paint. And I can't forget the old Army standby, “if you are in a fair fight, you just didn't prepare well enough.” I've coined a few myself, like “cheat first, cheat last, and cheat in the middle too!” Does fairness really apply in a world where a suicide bomber slips a stick of dynamite in a baby carriage? Will fairness play in a world of racial genocide? Where young teens with machetes hack off of the hands of mothers and children in Sierra Leone? And you want to fight fair? There is a weapon's continuum that master and grasshopper overlook.

Since man figured out he could use his thumbs, he's been inventing ways to kill at a distance. Missiles, guns, arrows, spears, swords, knives and lastly, empty hands. “I come to you with empty hands” is a foolish, misleading and dangerous term that should be replaced with “I come to you with full hands, you son of a bitch!” Fighting criminals and soldiers is a prospect we cannot gamble with. Fighting with empty hands should be the very last thing you do, after you have exhausted every weapon on and around you, tried every trick, spit your last drop of saliva into his eye. Sound too extreme?

So you think that the fair play and empty hands doctrine places us above the enemy? Higher moral ground? These days higher ground counts only in a shooting war, with the sun at your back. Might we degrade ourselves to the cursed status of being "like him?” Guess again grasshopper, because we will never be like him. There are good guys and bad guys and we will never be like him. As the globe turns, as time constructs and erodes civilizations, those psycho teens with machetes are just a failed education system away. They are just a few fatherless families away. They are just a few religious fanatics away.

Right now, in 2003, they are a boat ride away unless you naively vacation near the wrong holy ground or game preserve. You might be coming to a fight with just your empty hands, but if you stumble into the wrong crowd, you might be coming out with no hands at all. Got an opinion on this one? I'd like to hear it. Post it at HocksCombatForum.

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