Wo Fat
Purple Belt
- Thread Starter
- #21
Although I might be a bit more tolerant of rank-chasing, I can understand why some are less tolerant of it. Fair point.Rank grubbers and rank chasers are bad enough. Those are the people who skip around from instructor to instructor in order to get promotions that their actual instructors didn't see fit to give them. There is supposed to be protocol for how to switch instructors, but alas many do not follow it either. But at least these people did get their original training in Kajukenbo even if their ethics aren't what they ought to be.
I agree with making cross-ranked beneficiaries, honorary -- at least initially.Those that are cross ranked in anything but an honorary capacity are essentially invisible to me. I don't count them any more than I would someone commiting any other type of fraud. Abraham Lincoln used to ask people "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?" When they answered "Five" he would give them a disgusted look at say, "Four! Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg!" So when I see someone that has been cross ranked to me they are still a tail and not a leg at all.
Your proposals for how to handle "amnesty" or anything else have the unfortunate problem of being unenforceable. Those that are vested in they way things are will never change and put themselves under any unified rules like that. Even when Sijo established the BOA for 8th and 9th degree promotions for KSDI, there was a group of malcontents who felt they ought to be able to get rank in KSDI anyways and formed their own group and promoted themselves with KSDI certificates. I don't acknowledge their rank either. They too are "tails" rather than "legs" regardless of what the try to tell themselves and others. But it makes my point about the inability to ever enforce these things.
Yeah, there will be those who are vested in the status quo. But the way for things to change is to be smarter than those who don't want it. Being content to simply stand back and cast judgment from a distance might offer some personal satisfaction, but it does nothing in terms of moving forward. It's, ironically, the same investment in the status quo.
People from outside of Kajukenbo agree to be cross-ranked, then they obviously want to be a part of Kajukenbo. And if they're willing to be supervised and regulated while they learn it, become seasoned in it, and teach it, then it's better than what we had before.