Crazy Count

Covid-19 has messed up Jiu-Jitsu in many ways.

For me personally, it has kept me from any partner work since the shutdown. I am in a higher-risk category due to age, and am therefore playing it safe.

This should have meant a halt to any real progress in knowledge and skill, and a corresponding halt in progressing to a next rank promotion.

There are three components to promotion.

The first is time-in-rank. The absolute fastest that a rank stripe can be received is 8 months after a previous promotion. If you don’t have 8 months or more, nothing can or will happen.

The second is a minimum attendance requirement. Until this is met, there will be no promotion regardless of how many months you have been training.

This is the part that Covid messed up for me. Before it hit, I had reached 9% of the minimum by training at my home school, 2.2% more by training at the North Vancouver school, 10% by working one-on-one with Rob, and another 24.4% training in California with the Gracies. The total pre-Covid was 45.6% of the requirement.

Since then, Gracie University has been running online Zoom classes. They count each of these as much as  a regular hour of in-class training. Rank progress is important to students, and therefore continues. In Los Angeles, physical classes are still not allowed.

North Vancouver also started up online Zoom classes of their own that also count towards rank. They have since opened up a number of small classes on the mat, but also are continuing the Zooms. Sessions of either kind count towards rank.

My local school has also started up small live classes, which certainly count towards rank. There are no Zoom sessions being created, and as far as I know there has been no announcement of a policy towards counting them from other sources.

I have been keeping track of my online attendance with Gracie University’s sessions, and North Vancouver’s, and any work I have put in on working the curriculum on my own.

All of this has been averaging 8 or 9 hours of training per week, and has totalled 55% of the training requirement.

That 55% added to the 45.6% I had from before the Covid shutdown adds up to a hair over 100% of the minimum requirement.

However, that does not mean that as soon as I reach the end of my time-in-rank 8-month period that a stripe promotion will automatically arrive.

That brings us the third and most important requirement for promotion, which is the instructor’s approval.

By then I will likely be standing at 45.6% from pre-Covid, and well over 100% worth of solo, online Gracie University work, and online North Vancouver work.

Will my instructor count anything other than the 45.6% earned pre-Covid? I have no idea. If he doesn’t, a promotion would be on hold until after I am fully back on the mat, and then about 4 month of training time beyond that. I may not not be back to partner work until a vaccine is available.

The point is really that I will have done what is possible under the circumstances.

Tribes

A lot of the trouble with the world is all of the tribes.

Take any bunch of people, and in no time at all they will have figured out what group they belong to, and who the other groups are.

It doesn’t matter if the groupings make sense, they’ll find them anyway.

I happen to be Canadian, as are a lot of other folks. It we are travelling the world, that is pretty much how we define ourselves. When we are at home, that isn’t good enough.

In that circumstance, the province that we reside in seems to be the big thing. Newfoundland, Ontario, Quebec? That seems to matter a lot.

But why?

Friends of mine live in the Okanagan area of British Columbia. A lot of tourists visit there. A lot of the residents seem to resent these people, especially the many who come from Alberta. Why is this? I guess because they come from the wrong side of an imaginary line.

In my own little community, many people were furious with folks coming over on the ferry from Vancouver on a long weekend when Covid restrictions were still in effect. The most common complaint was that if the visitors brought infection, they would overflow, “our,” little hospital.

“Our,” hospital? It is paid for with tax dollars. The visitors support it just as much as the locals do. If somebody around here gets Covid and needs a hospital, that’s where they would go. If it is a serious case, they get promptly sent off to one of the big-city hospitals. Why wouldn’t they? We pay for those just as much as the city folks do. None of the hospitals belongs to any particular community. We are not separate tribes.

Then there’s all this nonsense about race. During Covid times, idiots are pissed off at anybody that looks Asian. Many American cops have two sets of behaviors; one for White citizens, while being very different towards those who are Black. I guess being Black puts them into the wrong tribe.

The American President has the support of almost 40% of American citizens, simply because at some point they identified him as part of their tribe. They can’t let that go.

Religion, race, nationality, region, career, political bent, social class, school, team; it’s all a bunch of crap.

Improving the Odds

My big activity is Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, and it’s been hit pretty hard by the Covid-19 shutdowns.

There is a great reason for this. If you were to try and find an activity with a greater risk of transmission I don’t think you could find one.

At a typical class, you’d show up, and there’s be quite a bit of hand shaking, hand slapping, and bro-hugs. The change rooms are tiny in size, and packed with people before and after class.

During class, you’d watch a demonstration lesson, and then grab a partner to work on what you’d just seen. You and your partner would be in immediate, direct contact, and working vigorously, and sweating, and puffing.

Then there would be another demo, and more practice. Perhaps you’d have the same partner, but maybe you wouldn’t. This would happen a number of times.

After the instructional segment, it would be time to roll. Here, effort increases significantly, and you change partners every few minutes.

That’s contact with a lot of people, sharing a lot of breath and sweat.

It is easy to imagine a single infected individual managing to infect and entire gym full of people by attending a single class.

That’s why nobody questioned the shutdown, but now it is time to start opening up again.

How can we change things to improve the odds?

The only guarantee would be to attend a class where nobody has Covid. Unfortunately, that is impossible to arrange.

The goal has to be to decrease the risk of contagion to something below 100%; not really very easy with a grappling activity.

The first step needs to be reducing the number of possible transmission points. This means direct contact with the smallest number of participants. This means having only a single partner.

Over a longer period of time than one class, that still means always having the same partner, or having a very small pool of partners.

A good example of being able to keep to a single partner would be if a couple came to train together. They only work together.

This isn’t always an option. If a pair of friends partner up for the long haul, and one can’t attend, then the other would be unable to train.

A more flexible, but slightly more risky venture, is having a little cell of partners. Our school seems to accept 3 persons per cell as a viable option.

This means if you are the only member of your cell present at a given class, you do not train. If two of you are present, you are good to go. If all three are present, you work together taking turns.

Between partners there is really nothing that can be done to protect each other except by minimizing the chance that you will be bringing Covid into your cell or to your partner.

It is pretty much guaranteed that if you work this closely with an infected person you will also get infected.

However, there are a lot of things that can be done to prevent transmission between the cells.

This means maintaining social distance when not actually in the lesson, and not using the change rooms or washroom. It means masks and hand sanitizer.

It also means sterilization of the mat before and after every session.

During actual training the mat must be segmented in a way that physically separates the participants. Partners or cells would be assigned a segment, and be expected to stay there.

They would be required to remain in their area during demonstrations, and at all other times. No wandering closer for a better view.

There would need to be good ventilation, and no hanging about before or after class.

There would need to be limits on exertion, to prevent spreading viral material unnecessarily around the room.

Sessions would need to be short, to decrease exposure time.

All of these measures, other than the permanent partner/cell rules, are aimed at not spreading Covid amongst people who are not in actual physical contact. The permanent partner/cell rules are to limit the number of people who share physical contact.

There should be no free-rolling, as that often ends up being very high exertion, which means more sweat and more airborne transmission. If there were to be free rolling, it should be limited to regular partners/cells only, on their same designated mat space. No rolling around all over using your body to soak up viral material left behind by other class members during the training session.

I can imagine being in a cell where somebody rolls with people chosen willy-nilly, and putting everybody at great risk, and then not bothering to tell their cell about it.

In my own case I’d want cellmates who would honestly inform me if they ever worked with a partner outside of the cell, or if they were at risk of exposure anywhere else. I could then decide if it was acceptable to me, or choose to isolate from them for the required two weeks.

At the nearby North Vancouver school, they are taking it all super-seriously.

They insist on face masks for all attendees though out the entire time they are present. This is not to protect their partners, but to lower the risk for surrounding students.

They also are tying to insist that all partners be members of the same household. This way their Jiu-Jitsu training would not be expanding their current close-contact bubbles at all. I don’t know if they will be able to stick to this.

Anyhow, that’s what is happening around here, in my little Jiu-Jitsu world.

For now.

Need for Change

There needs to be a change in police culture.

A big change.

In many places, the mindset that is promoted and supported is a copy of military attitudes.

For soldiers, it makes a lot of sense. They are part of a unit, and that unit needs to be able to depend on its members to perform crazy behaviours in order to succeed and survive.

It is the most logical in a traditional military situation, such as during the world wars. Soldiers are encouraged and rewarded for dividing the world into two categories of people; us and them. If you want to understand how this all works, you should watch the HBO series called Band of Brothers.

It closely follows the experiences of a unit of American Paratroopers during the second world war. Death is all around, and can strike any member of the group. This isn’t left up to the ingenuity of a team of writers, but is based on what really happened within that unit.

This us-versus-them mindset works well with a clearly identifiable enemy, but breaks down in a partisan war context.

The American experience of this in Viet Nam is a very good example. The soldiers still felt tightly bound together, but there was no clearly identifiable enemy.

American soldiers fought, and died, and killed, but were always trying to identify the enemy. This lead to horrible atrocities being committed.

Let’s say you are standing in your garden, and a helicopter flashes overhead at treetop height. You will look up. At one point in Viet Nam, somebody decided that only a Viet Cong fighter would be interested in a military helicopter flying about, and innocent civilians would ignore the incident. Therefore only the enemy would look up, and so it was decided that anybody looking up at US aircraft was a valid target. Gunners were authorized to fire at anybody doing so.

The most famous failure of the us-versus-them system happened at the village of My Lai. Approximately 500 unarmed civilians, mostly women, children, and the elderly were murdered by American soldiers. The killings started without warning, and proceeded in the fashion of a mass execution.

This type of mindset was still in evidence in every conflict since, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

Experts in all of these types of conflict fully understand that the only way to win a partisan war is by getting the support of the populace involved. Conversely, the best way to lose is by failing to embrace this concept.

In Iraq, while attempts were being made to settle things down, the standard operating system being used by the troops were counter-productive.

If any fire was received, air and artillery strikes were called in on the source of the firing. Usually, this meant the levelling of some village or town, with huge civilian loss of life. This type of thing turns people against the offending military force. It is like a recruiting campaign for the opposition.

In much of North America, the police seem to think they are in a war. Many of them have a military us-verus-them mindset. They are forever trying to identify the “enemy.”

Who are the outcasts in the police force? Is it the cop who needlessly guns down a civilian, or is the internal affairs officer who has the job of going after bad cops?

If there is an incident, cops often cover up for one another, including faking evidence, and lying in reports and at hearings. In effect, they act in the exact manner as old-style mafia members.

Let’s take a trivial example of this team mentality. On the recent season of the game show Survivor, there were two contestants who just happened to be police officers.

For the entire season, they called themselves Cops-R-Us, and operated as a team. They were not bonded because of personality, background, philosophy, or any other manner than their police experiences. They were forever telling each other, “I’ve got your back.”

Keep in mind that they had played together on a previous season, and had called themselves Cop-R-Us then, too. A notable feature of the previous season was that one of the two cops had turned on and backstabbed the other.

Even so, they stuck together the second time around. The fact that they were both cops was more important than the proven fact that one of them was quite willing to stab the other in the back.

What happens in the real world when a cop steps over the line?

Almost universally, other officers either try to bury the incident, or at best ignore it.

When handcuffed George Floyd died because a cop knelt on this neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, there were 3 other officers present. None of them pulled his killer off, or even suggested that it would be a good idea to get off of the totally helpless man.

Indeed, the incident looked like it was going to be ignored like so many others, and then the shocking video of the killing went public.

If I were to handcuff some stranger, chuck him on the ground, and then casually crush his neck I would expect to be immediately arrested and charged with murder, especially if I did it while being observed by 3 police officers. It took 4 days and a media storm before Floyd George’s killer was charged.

When such a crime by a cop goes to trial, police officers to the incident are always considered by prosecutors to be hostile and uncooperative witnesses. It is rare that they testify openly and honestly about what they know.

This is the exact opposite of how they are considered in all other criminal trials.

This is very similar to how soldier stick together in the face of an enemy army. It is also how soldiers stick together in a partisan conflict, even when it is totally inappropriate.

Think about it. Floyd George’s killer sparked off all of the massive outrage across society. People have died in the upheaval, including police officers. In effect, his casual willingness to commit murder has directly killed members of his police brotherhood. He might as well have shot them himself.

The us-versus-them mindset has no productive role to play in our society. Police need to consider themselves to be part of the people, not in opposition to it.

Many police officers already understand this. In several American cities, police officers sent out to control the crowds have joined in on the protest, and been greeted with open arms.

More commonly, citizens on the street have been greeted with rubber bullets, tasers, tear gas, and riot batons.

Things need to change.