Punching Day: YOUNG, ALERT, and AWARE 🌭

When you're a child, defeating a full-grown attacker can seem difficult. At least it did until 1986 when Al Johnson wrote YOUNG, ALERT, and AWARE: Self Defense and Self Confidence for Children. To be clear, this book won't help you defend yourself. What Al Johnson did was make writing a Karate book look so stupidly hard that defeating a person twice your size should seem easy by comparison.

Al Johnson, shown above in what terrifyingly must have been the best choice from that photo session, is a special education teacher and Tang Soo Do Karate black belt. He crusades against bullying using a combination of, and this is real, poetry and eye gouging. He focuses mainly on those two things, but I'd argue those two alone cover the entirety of anti-bullying tactics from worst to best.

Like all the best self defense manuals, the first sixty four (64!) pages of YOUNG, ALERT, and AWARE are devoted to Al Johnson's essays about his nation's moral decline.

"Hey, kids! Are you lacking in self confidence? In terrible danger? Do you need desperate help!? Well, first read 64 pages of things I normally only say to people at my church too old to leave."

Al's 17th essay is about "Americas's" crime rate. Numbers say it's going down, but let's talk truth about numbers: you can't trust the same squiggly shapes girlfriends use to detect missing condoms. Al Johnson, like all great social thinkers, knows that decreasing actually means increasing when it comes to alarming crime and it's up to us to panic accordingly. And any idiot who disagrees with him can go ahead and not get murdered; he'll wait.

Here's the other thing about society Al learned from procedural TV shows: most child molesters? The police have to let them go on technicalities. Plus, Al heard if you make a necklace out of an embassy license plate, you can drown a baby right in front of a cop. And don't get him started on how nobody knows how to drive in the rain anymore.

You might recognize this as a pretty ordinary mentality. You might not even see the problem with complaining about a terrible thing that definitely could have happened. But surviving potential danger is harder when you have an unrealistic idea of what that danger is. Seeing child predators with prosecutorial immunity everywhere you look doesn't make you safe. It makes you crazy, and far less capable of recognizing sex criminals than people who distinguish between them and (the far more common) non-sex criminals. If every obvious sex criminal was actually a sex criminal, all anime store clerks would die from pervert murder before their third lunch break.

Anyway, it's not a good sign that this self defense book opens with multiple essays on how you can't trust society or the law based not on evidence or anecdotes, but the gut feeling of a special ed teacher insisting kids learn how to remove human eyes with their fingers.

"Adults, have you noticed some disturbing differences in the morals of some children today?" Now that you mention it, Al, we were taught we should watch 90 minutes of a predictable thriller in order to see a sexy detective change her shirt. Now? Today? These youths are all on their phones, watching some guy plotlessly eat his step sister's ass. Where is the honor in such undignified, unearned lewdness, Al?

There's hardly anything more tired than a cranky old Karate master complaining about the moral decline of society, but have they ever been right? I guess you can check yourself thanks to the dystopia of modern politics. Get your parents and your children in a room and see which side knows immigrant baby concentration camps are bad. If you want to know how the Polish navy builds a submarine, should you ask your daughter or her grandfather? And real quick, Al, which generation starts self defense books with essays calling for the end of due process? The point I'm expertly making is that old people are intolerant pieces of shit but on the other hand, kids these days are the real jerks for giving up on religion and Karate.

Not all of Al's dry, rambling, poorly researched essays are for parents! Here's a checklist he included for kids to help their parents become more aware. It's mainly counterintelligence tactics like checking your car for intruders, using your rear-view mirror to make sure you're not being followed, and not fighting back. He included a list for both MOM and DAD, but they're almost exactly the same. One difference is how he explains to DAD how pickpockets work in teams and bump people, but his tip for MOM is to just not carry cash. Like in his essays, he's not wrong, but he's dangerously close to the dumbest of all non-wrong options. You know, I'm starting to think the wisdom administered by special education child martial arts instructors isn't refined by a ton of challenging feedback.

Let's move on to something less vague and more actionable. Let's take Al Johnson's SAFETY QUIZ FOR CHILDREN and find the actual magnitude of your awareness.

The quiz starts off pretty easy. Al puts you in hypothetical situations where the "yes" answer is obvious. Except sometimes you want a "no." This won't come up later because there's no answer key included, no discussion guide, nor any kind of rating you can get based on your "yes" or "no" answers. It's a series of questions Al knows you already know the answers to, and in the spirit of that, why the fuck did you put them in this book, Al?

Okay, let me skip past the seven straight questions about whether you would let people molest you, and...

What? You waited 17 questions into an awareness quiz to ask me if I know what "awareness" means? Yes. It means YOUNG, ALERT, and AWARE, is the Strangest, Dumbest, and Dumbest book about eye trauma ever published.

So to be clear: 17 questions into a quiz too moronic to have an answer key, the testgiver asks, "Hold on, do you even know what the shit is going on?" Al Johnson does not seem to have a lot of confidence in our judgement, but only two questions later he asks, "Can you tell if someone's bad just by looking at them? Okay, sure, it's the one skill I'm specifically training out of you, but after you spot one you know how to destroy their genitals, eyes, genitals, genitals, and eyes, right? Great! You're now both alert and aware!"

Now that we've passed or maybe failed the quiz and have no way of knowing which, let's move on to self defense awareness exercises! Time for some real Tang Soo Do Karate!

I was wrong about the pace picking up after the exercises start. Master Johnson uses two full pages to show you how to move your neck around.

Wait, sorry-- four full pages.

When the Karate finally starts, it goes through every combination of eyeball strike human hands are capable of. Now with a combat program this hypothetical and untestable, it's hard to say how effective it is. However, I think I have a strong case for this being the worst martial art not only ever, but conceivable. Sure, ramming things into your enemy's eyes is a fine idea, but one of the techniques is a limp double slap to the eyeballs Al calls "The Finger Flick." I put it to you like this, Al Johnson: if history's stupidest pussies got together they could not come up with a less dangerous eye attack than "The Finger Flick." Master Johnson, if your book said, "Try something maybe at their face?" followed by 205 blank pages, it would be a better guide to self defense, as no reader could ever interpret face attacks in a more harmless way than "The Finger Flick." Al Johnson, your book is either written to protect child molesters with sensitive eyes or completely fucking stupid. I'm pretty sure I know which one it is, but keep in mind I think I got a negative sle४ven߃glorp% on your awareness quiz.

Al teaches the same moves against dicks as he does against eyes-- throw your tiny hands and feet at them however you want, whether it would be ridiculous, benign, or too awkward to ever simulate for a photograph. Speaking of, Master Johnson's attacker model seems chosen not for his acting skill or menace, but for his willingness to stand very still while strange children rest their body parts on his groin. In fact, let me add a word bubble and see if it helps explain a theory of mine...

Yeah, this makes more sense to me.

Awareness Tip: The Ridge Hand (Fig. 71) is just Spear Hand (Fig. 67) with more eye contact.

Let's try putting all these techniques together. Say some guy corners you in a hallway-- Master Johnson has the perfect escape. First you do a Spear Hand to his eyes followed by a Leg Nudge to his penis! Then you run away because "the purpose for the girl is not to think about defeating the man in combat, this is unlikely." Okay, this one isn't a real confidence booster. Let's look at how Al suggests defending against a hair pull:

He has your hair! Step one is a Spear Hand to his eyes! Follow it up with a Leg Nudge to his penis! Now run away because "the purpose of this self defense tactic is not to have the young girl think she is stronger than the man. She is not!" Wait, hold on. This is exactly the same as the last one! Master Johnson, how is it possible you won something called a "Third Degree Black Belt" without ever learning a third Karate move? Let me give some real advice to your students-- boys and weak weak girls, always weaker than men, you've made a terrible mistake. You should just give up and do whatever your bully says.

Oh, never mind. Al Johnson covers doing whatever your bully says. He even concedes that if you do try to fight, you will find "better results" somewhere else. "Better results!?" I'm getting my ass kicked not changing skin creams! I... I fucking love this book. It's not unusual for a Karate manual to say "NEVER TRY THIS," but it's unprecedented for one to say, "Never try this because absolutely anything else would be better."

I swear on my groin and eyes you've seen everything Master Johnson has to offer in the way of combat, so let's move on to some of the more subtle survival skills.

This is what my lawyer would show to a jury if Al Johnson saw me kill somebody. He would say, "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, would a credible witness put this fucking shit in a book? Look at Figures 136 - (Relaxed) and 137 - (Tensed). This is the work of a madman. Which, as any Karate black belt knows, means you technically can't convict my client for the murder this man witnessed."

The judge would sigh heavily and say, "He's right. These murderers are always right. There's nothing we can do. In fact, he can kill as many people as he wants for 24 hours starting from when we saw the picture of the weird kid in Figure 136 - (Relaxed) and 137 - (Tensed). I suggest we all run."

Like the rest of YOUNG, ALERT, and AWARE, the index is Batshit, Stupid, and Stupid. There are only one or two entries for each letter and they are alphabetized by a random word somewhere within an uncommon turn of phrase. Also, there are no page numbers. So say you want information on self defense and awareness methods. You simply look under "E" for "Easy and effective self defense and awareness methods for the child to learn." It's quick to find since it's the only "E" and then slow to find since it doesn't say where it is in the book.

As I hope I've made clear, this may be the least educational anything. If Steven Seagal sewed a quilt about how to look cool while you run, I would say, "This ironic failure has a quiet dignity to it. Children, it's time you learned of the hilarious incompetence of YOUNG, ALERT, and AWARE." So it's very magical to me that the only "N" entry in the unnumbered index of the worst educational book ever published is "Natural teaching ability."

I don't have a joke about this one. I just wanted parents and educators to know if they need more information on children seeking help when trouble appears, it's under "T" for "The."