If you are able-bodied, and have the financial means, consider joining a BJJ or boxing/kickboxing/muay thai gym. The recent zionist mob violence - along with the neonazi/proud boy violence seen a couple years back - has driven home the point that we keep us safe. We cannot expect the fascist police to keep us safe, nor should we. As part of learning to fight you will learn how to move. Learning how to move is important to being able to evade the cops when they try to grab you, and to keep your balance and footing when the cops are shoving your line. Also, learning to fight is fun. A lot of people describe it as feeling like you’re a kid again, roughhousing with your friends (if that is an experience you had).
Some details so you know what to expect:
Training for most fight sports can be split into two categories: technique, and sparring. In the technique portion the instructor will show you some move or strike then everybody practices with a partner at low resistance as the instructor roves the area observing and correcting. Sparring, in contrast, is simulated real fighting. You and your partner will attempt to apply the moves you know to each other with significant resistance. The amount of resistance varies; in striking sports, you rarely use more than 25-50% power because you don’t want to hurt your partner. In grappling sports like BJJ it is more common to use 80% or higher levels of resistance due to the reduced risk of injury & concussion. The general consensus is you cannot learn to fight by learning technique alone. If you do not spar, you do not know how to fight because you have not been tested in anything resembling the crucible of the real world. Sparring is what separates actually effective martial arts from “fake” martial arts that claim their moves are “too deadly” to be practiced against a resisting opponent or some other such nonsense.
BJJ is the most accessible of all fight sports due to the low risk of concussion, compared with striking-based fight sports (for obvious reasons). In BJJ you spend a lot of time learning to fight a single person once you have both fallen to the ground. As we saw in the zionist violence, this is not entirely useful because once you’ve fallen to the ground the fascist’s friends will surround you and beat you. However, BJJ does teach how to get back up once you’ve fallen down with somebody on top of you and also how to keep your balance so you don’t fall down in the first place. Thus it is mostly valuable for learning how to move, since you’re unlikely to be locked in a 1:1 struggle in the sort of scenarios we are worried about.
Striking based sports are most useful for learning how to block the fascists’ attempts to punch or kick you. It’s questionable whether it would be worth it to actually strike somebody, but knowing how to absorb or block a shot is a nice skill indeed. If nothing else a good leg kick will make them think twice about coming near you.
To set expectations, you will take at least two years to become basically competent at any of these sports, if attending class 2-3 times per week for 2 hours at a time. By competent I mean you will be able to easily ragdoll almost any newcomer to the gym unless they are physically large & muscular or have significant background in wrestling or other physical sports like football. 99% of people you encounter in the real world will not have any training whatsoever.
Two years is a long time. The best time to have started training was two years ago. The second best time is now.
If combat training isn’t for you, there’s still a lot things you can do to make yourself less useless.
Dance for instance, especially earlier styles like viennese, waltz, polka, traditional Latin and Spanish dance, and especially ballet teach balance and movement. And just keeping your balance when the horses charge in is worth a lot.
As you go earlier pre-romantic ballet and court dance begin to openly have fighting moves in them, to the extent that until the 19th century dance was considered the foundation of many western combat arts.