Illusions and Reality
By Moshe Katz
CEO
Israeli Krav International

June 28, 2016, Antofagasta, Chile

Colombian coffee

We love our illusions. We love them so much that we rewrite history to make it more exciting. Ordinary events become epic battles, and if there are no heroes then we must create them. The people need heroes.

I am here in Chile where the national team just took the American championship in soccer/football. The entire town is overexcited. I was woken up in the middle of the night with the sounds of cars honking and people shouting. This morning on TV at breakfast I saw the sights of the jugadores, the players returning home and treated like royalty. How we love heroes.

In fact we love heroes and fantasies so much that an entire industry was created for this; Hollywood, Disney land, Fantasy Island. We love the movies. We love to escape from reality for a few hours and live the fantasy.

Sadly, with violence this is not possible. 

Hollywood is great at taking martial artists, or martial arts actors, and creating the Grand Illusion. We see fancy techniques that magically defeat the bullies. Sadly we fail to realize that it is no more real than Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

For reality training is very different and is generally not what people think it is. Even the so called "Boot camp reality training" is nothing more than feeding into people's fantasy. They want to be Rambo for a weekend, they want to get down and dirty, they want to feel some pain. So we give it to them. And they pay us handsomely.

I do not fit the image of a Bad Ass Krav Maga instructor and our style looks nothing like the fantasy martial arts of Hollywood, but it works, time and time again. We adapt, we adjust, we stay on the cutting edge of reality training.

Here in Chile I showed them how a few basic concepts, when understood correctly, can be applies to an infinite number of situations. I showed them only two gun defense techniques and then allowed to ask any questions they wanted, present any situations they could imagine. And our two defenses worked in every case. I am not a magician. I am not an actor. And I do not choose to escape reality by going to the movies. As we say in Israel, I do not live in the movies. We are reality.

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