Friday, August 1, 2008

Sheepdog Strategies, 2

Continued from "Sheepdog Strategies"

"She" could be your wife, daughter, fiancee, mother, sister . . . any woman you care about.

You look at your watch. She's never been this late before. You try her cell again, and you get the same recorded voice, "This party is not available . . ." Did she turn it off? Is the battery dead? Or . . . ?

The meeting at church was over hours ago. Where is she? You go over the possibilities in your mind: car trouble . . . a flat tire . . . took one of the other ladies home & lost track of the time . . . .

You deliberately shut out other possibilities. The insistent ones that hover about the edges of your consciousness with a silence that echoes in the pit of your stomach. WHERE IS SHE?

She never listened to you about taking a self-defense class, and she always put you off when you wanted to take her to the range to teach her how to use a handgun. In total frustration, you now teeter between anger and fear.

Then, headlights come into view in front of your house. Is that she . . . ? Or is that a police car . . . ?

We're Christian Martialists, and we are protective of the women we love. That's why we get so frustrated when they refuse to take the proper steps for their own safety.

In a future post I want to analyze why some women seem so averse to thinking about self-protection from possible violence. Today, however, I want to suggest a first, small step that may start that special gal thinking in the right direction.

It's a book by Keith Pascal called Tiptoeing to Tranquility. He calls it a parable because he wrote it in story form. It's about a woman with a teenage daughter who firmly rejects the idea of martial arts, but who does not feel safe, even in he own neighborhood.

Then she meets someone who gives her and her daughter lessons in living safely and tranquilly in the modern world. Further into the story, there is even a soft-sell on taking formal self defense lessons.

As with any book like this, there will be some areas with which the epistemologically (look it up) self-conscious Christian does not agree. Page 40 is a case in point.

On page 40 he refers to Soren Kirkegaard, the father of Existentialist philosophy. In that place he asserts that faith is uncertain. If he had also read Cornelius Van Til, he would realize that without true faith, nothing is certain.

Farther down the page, he makes a comment that indicates he may be familiar with Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I interact more or less extensively with that work's insights and flaws in my book, Christian Methodology.

Perhaps I'll have an opportunity to discuss some of these matters with Keith, sometime, but for now let me say that the value of this book to you and particularly to the special female(s) in your life is worth it. (BTW, I have often used the areas I disagree with in a book as an occasion for discussion and learning with my wife & daughters. This increases, not decreases, the utility of a book.)

Tiptoeing to Tranquility is just a baby step in the right direction for those you care about, but it is a step, for your peace of mind and theirs, that you want them to take.

In fact, if the woman in the story at the beginning of this post had read, heeded and practiced just the first (non-martial) piece of advice described in the book, I believe the odds would have increased by more than 90% that the headlights in the drive were hers and not those of the police.

Continued in "Sheepdog Strategies, 3"

3 comments:

The Warrior said...

Oh. My. Gosh.

Okay, I literally have been very frustrated over this same issue lately. In fact it was going to be a Warskyl forum topic; I just hadn't gotten to it yet.

I don't understand. As I know we're alike in this regard I know you'll understand what I mean when I say I live daily with a burden for defending women.

I have women in my family, like any other guy. I've been getting so frustrated lately. They don't want guns or knives, okay. I'm looking into laws on pepper spray. They're not too keen on that I think, but I'm not going to let them off the hook. As soon as I'm 100% sure about all the local laws, I'm buying some.

So, seeing as they don't want martial arts classes or anything, and they won't take any practical tips from me (in the sense that I can't get them to actually put a little time aside so I can show them some easy self-defense techniques), I tried a different approach a a couple of weeks ago.

I put some women's SD DVDs on our Netflix list, telling them that they wouldn't get out of watching them. Yeah, they're just DVDs and you have to actually try moves to learn them, but I figured this would at least be a start, and, who knows, maybe I could get them into more and more of it.

Well, they're not wanting to watch them. I tried to make them more than once, but backed off on that as that approach only caused friction--not the result I was looking for.

I'm still gonna try to get them to watch them, but I'm not sure how to do this. They keep on putting it off. I've watched both of them (Jim Wagner's Women's Survival and Live to Tell About It, I'll likely blog about them, soon hopefully) and I think they're pretty good. Maybe I can get them to try some moves with me...wishful thinking?

In other words, I can't get hardly any women around me (even friends) to mobilize and actually see their own un-safety and do something about it. I don't think they'd ever read a book I asked them to, either.

Is my situation hopeless? What do you recommend? Am I going to have to scare them somehow with stories or whatever of rapes or something? I don't think that's a very good approach....

Spencer

P.S. Can we keep this either here or on the forums, instead of my blog, if you don't mind sir?

Craig Mutton said...

You may certainly address it on the forum. Also, keep an eye here. I do plan to talk about some of the female-type thought process.

As I've said before, I don't have all the answers, but I do have some ideas. Maybe some other readers do, too.

We'll work through it, together for the sake of our women folk.

The Warrior said...

Well, you have more answers than most people I know.

*runs off to start topic*

Spencer