The Concept Of A "Black Belt Attitude" Is (Mostly) Bulls--t, Entry #1

I published my first entry in the series on June 24th, 2022, roughly one week after I coached a student of mine at this significant annual Taekwondo tournament.  He was the only student who could enter because everyone else either had plans or didn’t have time to prepare for the tournament.

I ran into a former student who trained with us from late 2019 to early 2021.

I didn’t recognize him because I hadn’t seen him for a year and a half since he left our dojang and he was wearing a cowboy hat.  I’m definitely not a morning person, either, and that could be another reason I didn’t recognize him.

He has been with another TKD school since early 2021, something that he neglected to tell our teacher, which got him excommunicated from our school.  The person was impatient and wanted to test for his 1st Dan but my teacher didn’t let him test yet because he didn’t know the Palgwe forms, which our school teaches the Palgwe and Taegeuk forms.

I told my teacher, the following Monday, that I ran into the person.  

I didn’t pay attention to what school the person was in now, which meant I didn’t know the answer when my teacher asked.  I went online and researched the school, which led me to a section on the school’s page about what it meant to have a “Black Belt Attitude.”

As I mentioned in the original Medium article, I wanted to vomit.  I still want to vomit whenever I think about it or when I see something similar on another school’s site or social media page.

I was reminded that martial artists are as informed as the next person, which is a deep-cutting double-edged blade.  

To sum it up, the concept of having a “black belt attitude” is to be positive and to only have “good vibes.”  I can understand the logic because being negative only drags us down and causes us to have doubt in our hearts BUT the world is so complex that we cannot have the “good vibes only” mentality.

In my 10th-grade English class, we were to read The Monkey’s Paw (there was a Halloween episode of The Simpsons that had a segment on it) and have a discussion about it afterward.  I remembered our teacher asking us this question, “What happens if you wish that nothing bad happens when you wish on the monkey’s paw?”

If you haven’t read the story or watched the short film, the monkey paw grants corrupted wishes.

I can compare the dynamic to the plot dynamic of “equivalent exchange” in Fullmetal Alchemist.

Our teacher said that “too much good can be bad.”

The good vibes-only mantra of having a black belt attitude hurts progress because we willfully ignore potential problems, believing that these problems don’t exist, only for those problems to sting us, while being indoctrinated into believing that we were neither positive nor confident enough.

Despite the good intentions of the concept of a “BBA,” its idea discourages us to think and it discourages us to come up with solutions.  We’re supposed to be confident in ourselves and tackle incoming problems head-on, without taking the necessary preparations, and to come out on top.

Anything less is considered dishonorable…

We’re discouraged to think critically or creatively.  Thinking critically is “blasphemous” because we don’t have enough faith or confidence in our training.  Thinking creatively is “blasphemous” because it risks tarnishing the legacy of our predecessors.  

It’s all good vibes only and legacy over everything else because that’s all that we “need.”

The concept of a BBA allows us to endure hard times but not prepare for them, there are differences between “endure” and “prepare.”  Enduring means doing what you can to weather the hard times while preparing means doing what you can to mitigate the figurative ordeal.

Five Days At Memorial, an Apple TV+ original limited series, was a great example of the differences between enduring and preparing.  The series was adapted from the non-fiction book of the same name by Sheri Fink.  The story takes place at the titular Memorial Medical Center before it was renamed the Oschner Baptist Medical Center, in New Orleans, one day before the city was hit by Hurricane Katrina.

Things were seemingly fine once Katrina had passed by but it wasn’t the case because the levees failed, a design flaw by the Army Corps of Engineers, because they were designed to withstand winds from a Category 3 hurricane.

Katrina was a Category 5 hurricane…

The levees broke and all of New Orleans was flooded and which led to a royally f–ked fiasco on a political and economical level.  The insurance brokers refused to insure the damaged properties because they lacked flood insurance, but the flooding wasn’t natural, it was manufactured because of the levees.  

Even though the damage came from flooding, the flooding was a result of wind damage to the levees.

Anyway, back to the s–tshow that happened at the Memorial Medical Center the five days that followed after…

The medical staff, the non-medical employees, the patients, and everyone who sought shelter at Memorial did endure, BUT they shouldn’t have had to endure.  Enduring the aftermath cost the lives of many people, which led to the scandal that inspired Fink to write the book.

There was a lack of preparation from all levels of leadership.

Memorial Medical Center didn’t have an evacuation plan ready to activate and its parent company, Tenet, didn’t have an approved evacuation plan, either.  Tenet, despite its unwillingness to actively help in the evacuation, claimed no wrongdoing.  

Tenet and the parent company of LifeCare, a long-term care provider that shared the same building, didn’t bother to collaborate on a joint-evacuation plan, either.  Dr. Susan Mulderick assumed that LifeCare had its own evacuation plan, which it did NOT, and left the staff & patients to their own devices, which was disastrous.

One would be quick to applaud the survivors for enduring, but nobody should have been put in that predicament in the first place.  Tenet, LifeCare’s parent company, and the Memorial Medical staff shouldn’t be the only ones to shoulder the blame.  

There was poor planning at the city, county, state, and national levels, too.

Helicopter evacuations were risky, too, because the landing pad dilapidated over the years.  The stairway was so rusty that it could have broken at any given time and that wouldn’t be good, especially when the neonates were given first priority on the Coast Guard helicopters.

Enduring resulted in the euthanization of people’s beloved pets and it led to the scandal where over 40 patients were euthanized because they couldn’t get evacuated.  Schaefer, who was investigating the deaths of the patients, breaks down in front of his wife and asks why didn’t Memorial staff try to save the LifeCare patients.

Again, it was a lack of preparation.

The good vibes-only and think-only positive thoughts mantras of the “BBA,” in this respect, made things worse.  You’re forced to pick one horrible option over another equally horrible option.

If Memorial Medical and LifeCare were properly prepared, enduring the next five days would have been less problematic.

The city and state weren’t properly prepared, either.

The government was slow to send aid to New Orleans, despite it being quick to send aid overseas to its allies.

The typical BBA logic would be to criticize anybody of “negative behavior” for pointing out all the potential problems and to further criticize them for having “no faith” in trying to come up with solutions to those problems.  

The Greatest Beer Run Ever, another Apple TV+ original, serves as another great example of the difference between enduring and preparing.  The film, based on the book of the same name, centers on John “Chickie” Donahue’s adventure through Vietnam to bring beer to his neighborhood buddies who were currently fighting in the Vietnam War.

The film taught many hard, but valuable lessons about warfare.

Chickie got overconfident and believed that Vietnam was going to be a cakewalk but was for a rude awakening when he got to LZ Jane.  In my Medium article on the film, I said that “YOU ARE CHICKIE DONAHUE IN THIS SITUATION!”  I stood by what I said when I typed up the article and I stand by that today.  If you want a better understanding of what I said, read the full story on Medium.  

It would be an understatement to say that Chickie had a hard time in Vietnam.

The good vibes-only mantra that Chickie had went down the drain when he experienced a firefight for the first time in his life.  

Where did that positive thinking get Chickie?  

He was so positive that it would only take him a few days to make his beer run and make it back in time to catch the ship home.  Chickie didn’t prepare for the possibility that something could come up, like news of an imminent surprise attack, that would cause the ship to leave port earlier than expected.

So yeah, negative thinking allows us to think of potential problems and find solutions.

The concept of a BBA discourages negative thinking, which prevents us from thinking of problems and finding solutions.