Why does it always gotta be about a "bar fight"?
Why cant it be at the water park?
Or the grocery store?
Or just because someone is havin a bad day and they feel like fightin.
If you're getting into fights at the water park and the grocery store or are around the kind of people who fight because they are having a bad day, then you need to examine your lifestyle and the people you associate with. I stopped having 'SD' situations the minute I stopped going to night clubs and distanced myself from most of my old crowd.
Non physical elements are vastly more important in the circumstances that you list above, and those elements need no sparring or hard contact to develop. Learning effective verbal and social skills will help you 99.9 percent of the time, and I'd be willing to bet that most of these supposedly SD focused hard core schools spend zero time on those skills.
You dont have to be in a bar to get into a fight.
No you don't, but if you are finding yourself around people that randomly want to pick fights, I'd be willing to bet that you are frequenting places where alcohol is flowing freely, or are simply accociating with toxic or delf destructive people.
I thought the purpose of MA was for self defense in any situation at any time. Some where along the line that concept got lost in TKD world.
You thought wrong. Self defense is only a very small part of modern (meaning late ninteenth century onward) martial arts. Gendai budo, which strongly influenced taekwondo (some argue that taekwondo comes out of gendai budo, specifically Shotokan), is about improving yourself via the martial path, not about self defense. SD is a byproduct of the martial arts, not the primary target.
Taekwondo is no more about self defense than MMA, boxing or kickboxing, and the same holds true for most other martial arts. Yes, you can defend yourself with MMA, judo, boxing, taekwondo, Shotokan, or aikido, and if you have a cane handy, you can defend yourself with kendo.
Actually, the principles of kendo can be applied to unarmed defense as well; one of my students used 'kendo' with a schoolyard bully. He didn't have a sword or a shinai with him, but he used the non physical elements to gain advantage against a much larger boy who was intent upon beating him up, and popped him in the nose. My student had no unarmed training whatsoever and has never done any contact sparring outside of kendo, but he said that it was the fighting spirit, timing, and principles of offense and defense that came into play.
So, this kid defended himself with kendo, but kendo is not a self defense art. Likewise, you can defend yourself with any striking art, but it doesn't make it a self defense system.
If you haven't, go and take a true self defense class. You'll find that it is a lot different from a taekwondo class, even a taekwondo class at a top notch, hard core school. Much of what you learn (or should learn) in an actual self defense class is how to
avoid fights and situations where you would need to physically defend yourself.
Living safely is like driving; in driving, you train to drive safely and to avoid situations that will result in an accident, not crash survivability. You train to stay out of the northbound lane when you are going south; you shouldn't be there and if you are, you may end up in a head on collision. Drivers don't train to drive on the wrong side of the road and slalom through oncoming cars; that would be stupid; you're not supposed to be there in the first place. Nor do drivers train to 'body check' cars that drift across the lines back into their own lanes; that would be stupid, as avoiding the idiot is a far better course of action with a much greater chance of success, and without the accompanying potential for legal problems.
Likewise, a clean, healthy lifestyle that doesn't involve going places where you have no business going, the social and verbal skills to handle antagonistic people, and the situational awareness to know when to extracate yourself from a potentially dangerous situation are of far greater value than any fight skill.
