Part III; Continued; The Good Rebel in Most of Us: Competitions, Challenges, and Making Things Right
"Part III: The Good Rebel in Most of Us
(Continued; Competitions, Challenges, and Making Things Right)"
From
How the Westbury High School Rebels
Houston, Texas, classes of 1962-1965
Saved Western Civilization from Extinction"
Another Pretty True Texas Story
by
A Westbury High School Boy
This article presents the conlusion to Part III: The Good Rebel in Most of Us." It continues from the beginning of Part III of the Westbury Rebel essay (an editorial);
Series Contents
- “Part I: Women of Eden, Texas; 1838-1963-2014”
- “Part I: Navy Corpsmen: Tribute to a Westbury Hero”
- "Part II: (beginning) The Westbury Rebel's Meaning to Me," or "The First Play from Scrimmage in the Westbury vs Bellaire Fifty Year Rivalry"
- "Part II: (conclusion) What Happened at the End of the 1962 Westbury vs. Austin Football Game?"
- “Part II: Entertainment in the 1960s”
- "Part III: The Good Rebel in Most of Us (beginning); For What Do Good Rebels Fight and Die?"
- "Part III: The Good Rebel in Most of Us (continued); Competitions, Challenges, and Making Things Right"
- "Part III: The Good Rebel in Most of Us (conclusion); Distinguishing Good from Bad Rebels"
- "Part IV: Westbury Rebel Management of Really Serious Troublemakers in (and from) the Global"
- "Part IV: Master of the Lake; The Great Peking Duck and Yorkshire Terrier Battle; or, A Scientifically acceptable Anecdotal Example for the Study of Visceralness in Fighting"
- “Part V: Turn the World Right Side Up: Theory and Application for Depowering Psychopaths, BS Managers gone Berzerk (Bad Rebels), and the National to International Institutions they Manage"
Westbury Rebel Competitors Other than San Jacinto, Lamar, Stephen F. Austin and Bellaire High Schools (Circa 621AD to 1917-to-1961-1966 to Extant)
Regrettably, not everybody in the world of today have become as laid back, peaceful and serene as have I. Although we Westbury Rebels, in conjunction with a few other American high schoolers produced during the Sixties, who implemented the American foreign policy theory of Containment and the Truman Doctrine (1947), also termed the Cold War or WWIII, eventually defeating in 1989-1991 the foremost organized intellectual attack on the importance of individual ontology to the definition of the human consciousness in this past two hundred years, that is, Leninism's manifestation of Socialism within the former great Soviet Union, are easing into a lesser stringent fighting role. The center of the Rebel line in the 1962 Westbury defense, John Gosnell, died at age sixty-six a couple of weeks ago. He carried that defensive spirit into that victory for humankind by serving in the United States Navy for twenty-six years.
Leninism and the Soviets
That 1917-1989 war was clear cut. Lenin outlawed individual ontology by redefining it as psychopathology: the old Enlightment concept of personal identity fired by some form of spirit — in this thesis referenced as individual ontology and others as manifested by God, still others as an aspect of human creativity, and then a few more as just the capacity to care about or to love another person — and which the Leninist view was argued to be quite different from the nomenclature created from within the minds of Abigail and John Adams, George Washington and Sam Houston, should be washed away from within the physical brains of the world's inhabitants, replacing into what Lenin and his proteges argued were vacuous shells a new and strengthened by flawlessness utopian also called the new "Soviet man" — actually named by Stalin "Homo Sovieticus" — one who only existed as an integrated element of the new Borg, a part of the collective consciousness that saw no or otherwise acknowledged any individual ontology at all.
The spirit of man which manifested itself within that element of consciousness, didn't really exist, echoed his followers all singing from the chorus comprised of Uncles Joe, Mao and to a lesser extent Ho and Po (Pol Pot). They made human ontology's most prevalent learning brain integrative methodological vehicle, grief, which substrate is a molecular fact of life, unconstitutional by statute. It, meaning grief which also is one of, when presenting in interaction with its counterpart joy, the most important biological contributors to humankind's attempts to learn from and assimilate loss, particularly to include that which manifest within the need to reconcile those mistakes created alone through the application of cerebral functionings — the substrate of the brain's capacity for abstraction or ordination of other philosophical styled theory, an admirable quality that when simultaneously taken alone becomes a restriction on the brain's more potent integrative processes that encompasses all its faculties — was simply made to be against the law.
At first there was some resistence in those domains to Lenin's anti-individual ontology definition that countered the parallel work being done by our rebels in America who were hammering out, codifying in our myriad legislations and their judical reviews, and honoring / respecting in those promulgations our rules governing how we all got along, and all the while holding the individual ontological concept in high above all things in their struggles for implementation. But after killing seventy million of his (Mao's) population, and adding that to Uncle Joe's thirty million deranged individually focused souls also being effaced from the planet — eventually the deaths add up enough to influence one's and sometimes even an entire constituent's philosophy — in the process facilitated those groups' now edified-by-terror remainders, understandably concluded that individual Being was not such a big deal afterall. Matter of fact, it was the greatest sin requiring extermination, those remaining thinkers not yet killed off concluded.
That polity of socialists philosophers and other intellectuals were implementing that countervailance to our model of the individual human capacity to think, feel, create and love while we Westburians were only becoming inklings in the eyes of our parents, but then later even after we had evolved to going out on dates in our beloved culture in Texas. But the Rebels left that happy cocoon, albeit a struggling one for some, and entered the fray, to eventually stand that particular, at least the part that proselytized its ideology by murdering millions, concept down, and doing so against constant nihilistic challenges to our own definition of humanness back here at home.
Fascism, Academes and the Westbury Rebel
As a viable counter to America's, Texas' and Westbury High School's notion of the value of the individual as he or she exists within the realm of their community, the other Twentieth Century contravention to America's concept of individual ontology, Fascism, was put in check for a while by our parents, now becoming octogenarians - even nearly centurions. That mind stealing horror, Fascism also manifested by Nazism, is almost dead and gone, except where it manifests in some procedural implementations and is concomitantly supported by the hearts and minds of its advocates in the world of the new administration of Academia.
I'm not talking about the conscientious academics that used to teach in our universities, and maybe some still do at least in the business schools, but the collective academic consciousness that has both supported the former Soviets and who have now given birth since their demise to the dictitorial force-based (but instead of the sticks and stones used by Mussolini's boys for controlling discussion in 1924-5 Italy, this group of eruditions breaks heads and bones with intellectual collusion, coercion, ideological control through exclusion-omission founded on hegemonous political contrivance, manipulation and granite-headed ignorance and stupidity) post-identity, post-modernism, post-nationalism, multiculturally-imbued post-Americanism or post any nation's uniqueism; and all that in just a few decades. Think that's a little over the top? Not a single academic institution in this post western civilization period would allow an academic course on Conservatism philosophy and methodology to be taught until 2010 where it was allowed in only one stalwart American college's curriculum. And that is the greatest of ironies; academes have always believed that being the bulwark against such intimidating models that tried to control thinking, whether done out of left or right or non secular ideologies, was the purpose of their existences. Too bad. This group has failed, not just our civilization, but themselves.
Facsism doesn't manifest just when the brown or black shirts or those folks with the single red star on their foreheads begin crashing through your door; that comes near the end of implementation. It has an earlier start up where the instigators of the model test the waters — they are the measurement of your hearts and minds as they are perceived by the bullies to be glued together with stalwartness, or not. And Fascism doesn't just show up in a particular leftist or rightist ideology, but as the beginning takeover philosophies that strip individuallity from the human consciousness as it presents itself within debate in and between groups. When you find yourself afraid of speaking your heartfelt mind within an institution or community because you won't be able to advance yourself with your otherwise hard work, due diligence and honesty, then you are living in or at least the beginning implementation of a Fascist-run neighborhood, and even if the leaders of your society have yet to put on their arm bands that carry the logos representing their particular causes. Fascism advances itself on the fear of being branded as somebody you are not. And political correctness gone wild or otherwise stringently enforced is its beginnings. In the year 2011, it has become the operative methodology for academia.
Has anything changed in the last fifty years? Yes. In those now apparently olden days, 1961-1965, the Westbury Rebels, thanks be to their parents and the lessons they learned from the fear and denial of the 1930s and its horrendous expense culminating in WWII, and as passed down by our principals, Mr. Burns and Mr. Gupton; our coaches who took us into and through that formidable intermural world of scholastic, art and athletic competitions; and as well from our teachers and advisors like Ms. Campbell, Mrs. Rose and Ms. Lodge and all the rest who stood up for character and rightness of principle and then worked to strengthen us accordingly, we learned the importance of discovering those truths, and then to fight for them.
When you hear yourself believing or saying "We are who the erudite say we are," then know you're a goner, duped and controlled by Fascism, or at least its rudiments. The heart of the Westbury Rebel is the supra antithesis of that holocaust-destined, that is, guaranteed destructive and inevitably heinous, management model. Now if I say something about how good you are, then you can go with it, cause I don't say it from erudition — but instead, from the heart. Big difference!
What's the best way to manage Islam, or to avoid being managed by, and still get along with, It? Love and Tolerance?; or, Hate and Fighting?; or, Surrender and Submission (Dhimmi conversion)?; or, Inferentially Defamational — but truthfully Critical Humor?; or, a Combo Approach?
As we age, there's one very serious definitional challenge left. And it didn't just show up out of some recent third rate Marx-, Parekh-, Hobsbawm-, or Habermas-like nation-makeover philosopher's head. Actually, this contestant for the Big (world) Control has had a proven track record of gobbling up whole peoples' and countries' individual and collective identities — human and systemic ontologies for a long time. It even eats the peoples, themselves; that is, not just in metaphorphic terms of destroying the human consciousness, but their program has from time to time, and now being one of them, actually supported exigetically and in practice the consuming of appropriate persons, depending on their affiliation with Islam or no. (If in doubt that this reference to aspects of cannabalism is just an attempt to demean this particular religion/political organization and global-based management model, see Egypt's prestigious Al-Azhar Univesity's address of that fact, which has currency in its implementation, in Wallid Shoebat's and other's works.) But its resurrection re-began for the umpteenth time with Mustafah Kemal's (Ataturk) firing of the Scotch drinking Islamic Caliphate at the end of the Ottoman Empire's revolution in 1923-24.
As soon as that degenerate (because he drank scotch instead of bourbon and beer) was sent packing on the train to Paris, Hassan al-Banna started the rebuild with the now new and improved public relations-oriented, al taqiyya-based, mysogynism-underpinned, mideast-oil-profits-funded, stealth jihad and lately Internet savvy, Islamic intellectual reformers- (Islam dissenters-) -murdering Muslim Brotherhood. Then thanks to Sayyid Qutb, who after a couple of months exposure to degenerate church life made up of sex- and dancing-only kinds of sinning (a dry county - no alcohol was served for drunkenness sinning at that time) in beautiful downtown Fort Collins (no relation), Colorado circa the early 1950s, made the mistake a few years later and when back home in always peaceful and apparently non-sinning Egypt (one of the academic bulwarks of the peaceful religion) of fighting straightaway the Nasserite socialists' attempts to blend Marx and Pan Arabism with a little bit of Islam — thus the erudite Qutb was hanged while in an Egyptian prison for not supporting that Gamal Nasser-inspired merger of ideologies (and incidentally plotting to kill the charismatic merging Major) — the Brothers and consequently today's Islamic resurgence were uplifted by his substantial and significant (for today's Islam) written work done while in jail. Solitude is always one of the most important influences upon ontology-based writers; he knew right where to go to get some.
The idea was and is, again thanks to Al-Banna and Qutb, to restore Islamamama to its rightful state in the image of its historic leader, Mr. Perfection himself, Muhammad. (Over its up and down performance history, Islam's resurrectors, always following the system's failure, conclude that the believers got away from the basics — never do they contemplate that something may be wrong with the basics.) In fairness to that fellow, also fondly known by his followers as The Messenger, he insightfully never thought of himself or claimed to be infallible or otherwise a perfect kind of guy; that was his later promoter-styled staunchly-believing followers' doings.
Speaking objectively forensically and of course with care not to be influenced by unconscious irrational fear or anger (Islamophobically) — mine (anger) is all conscious after watching the world's unbelieving innocents be killed in mass — he was another psychotic voice-hearing from the past and quintessential psychopath who still dupes from the grave terrified, traumatized, confused and otherwise lost people to follow him by walking off cliff after cliff after cliff. So goes every jihadist worth his martyrdom salt looking to finally get laid, by sexually innocent (meaning virgins) children — both little girls and boys — no less, upon hitting bottom.
Islamism, as once did some sectarian anamolies produced out of Christianity — but which movement has as a whole learned its lessons about the force of creeping individualism's spirit during the Reformation — has concluded, at least in its charter documentations, the Sunnah, and as ordained and promulgated from Islam's 610 - 632AD conceptualization period of inception, that individual ontology has no viable place on Earth for existence, except within Islam's approved through Dhimmitude controlled status. And there, individual identity is squashed beyond recognition. Thus, Islam's followers, absent those within its ranks who (euphamistically and hopefully to stay this way called moderates) — as did Christians who eventually rebelled against the aggressive abuses imposed during the eras of the middle ages and then Inquisitions; and the formation of America was epitomized by that rebellion — are trying to reform Islam, are hell bent to rid this world through its liberation of and from the perceived decadence. It is comprised in the Islamist's view of people who aspire to think individually from their ontological essence and thus freely for themselves and the management models that support the continuation of those Selves, to mean us.
Islamism, also called radical or fundamental — but only truly being purist — Islam because it explicitly follows the procedures of Sharia promulgated in the Koran, al Hadith, Messenger's biography, and the findings of a millennium of Ulema (honored legal or exigete interpretators of the Sunnah), is nothing to fool around with, or otherwise underestimate. They've done a pretty good job with that eradication effort ever since the program began in that earlier time, taking — not just three thousand of the best of America at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and those perishing in that field in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, but another 270 million individuals. Breaking it down so that one can feel the details, that thing euphamised under cover of al taqiyya — the standard Mohammadean strategy for hiding truth and its consequences from its poor targeted unsuspecting innocently thinking citizenry — as a peaceful religion has killed and mostly murdered one hundred twenty million Africans, sixty million Christians, eighty million Hindus-Indians-Persians and ten million Buddhists with one Southern Thailand Buddhist bicycle children's ice cream, pop-sickle and now decapitated vendor thrown in, all occuring as a direct consequence of the Islamic thought model's existence and approach to proselytization.
When the Muslims killed that Buddhist popsickle vendor — just one of the innocent lives taken by the over seventeen thousand terror - murder Muslim caused episodes occuring since September 11, 2001, and which was only one of those incidents — they left his seventy year old traditionally orange robe clad body still sitting on the bike standing upright against a tree as a reminder to the children who had flocked to him during his daily visits to not go Buddhist, and then walked through and out of the village laughing while carrying the formerly sweet, innocent and although differently, still religiously imbued icecream man's head and their long serrated knives in their blood covered, respectively, arms and hands. "Allahu Akbar!" the gang shouted. And the referenced groups of Islam caused murder statistics are provided without counting the many times that number enslaved by turning during fourteen hundred years the myriad populations' brains inside out with — for those not separated from their bodies — and through and into Dhimmitude.
That's almost not fair, though, to compare those numbers to Lenin's efforts in only one century, the twentieth. Islam did its work over fourteen similar periods, averaging then only 19.2 million deaths per hundred years, only one fifth of what the Bolsheviks and their proteges were able to do during our and our parents' era. Spreading murder out over time helps surviving victims and their responding polities to slip their memories, and newby trauma affected Islamic apologists historians influenced out of Stockholm Syndrome, a civilizational and regrettably natural albeit weird (trauma victims identify with and then outright support the perps who are trying to kill or maybe just maime them) systemic response to trauma caused by psychopathic perpetrators, to rewrite the history of that apocalypse already experienced by those unfortunate citizens. And so came from that syndrome the concept of political correctness — the communication model adapted by a people's managers to support collective delusion and denial necessary at times for controlling the mass experience of trauma, but regrettably and paradoxically dangerous to and for the actual survival of the species.
Islam has tried, but notably not before stealing - plagiarizing without proper attribution (in fact, the Prophet just murdered those unfortunates who shared their various religious rituals with him after they were republished with his and Allah's copyright) all the cool seance styled ideas its predecessors (Jews, Christians, Persian Zoroastrians and even those no good pre Islamic heathen idol worshiping pagan Meccans) had conjured over the prior millennia, to quash or just flat out annihilate its competingly antithetical branches of thought and human ontological management. Again emphasizing the same unfortunate kinds of believers coming out of Judaism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Buddhism, Atheism, Confucianism, Hellenism, Democracyism and pretty much Everythingism, and even a few from their bully but sometimes recently (last century) supporting counterpart, Marxism. The latter equally cerebrally overloaded rationalist system of abstract planning for humankind's utopian earth periodically becomes blended with the Islamist's rhetoric, or at least used to routinely be before the beginnings (1989-1991) of the demise of Marx's credibility as a thinker, depending on the Islamist's personal geographical and epistemological influences on upbringing, particularly in the Stan-ending countries comprising the underbelly of the former Soviet Union - now in its ashes just old Mother Russia.
It's 1939-40 all over again. In this last of the twentieth century and now beginnings of the twenty-first, Europe is gone, nearly again, called in the courageous scholar Bat Ye'or's Eurabia The Land of Islamic Dhimmitude. I'm sure the reader is up to date with that implementation methodology for Islam's conquered lands and indescribable numbers of their previous populations enslaved by it. If not, you can probably get the New York Times and maybe even a couple of US State Department officionados to explain it in dhimmi, Stockholm Syndrome, politically correct, truth-obfuscating, coweringly-pathological 1930s - 40s vintage coverup styled language for you.
When in 2003-4 French President Chirac's party spokesman, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres argued publically that Europe and America shared the same "preoccupation with terrorism," Madam Bat Ye'or, an Egyption and one of the world's greatest Islamic scholars, responded in her work;
"Yes. No doubt they share the same preoccupation,
but with a big difference:
America fights terroism and France goes along with it!"
The noted scholar and historian went on to say "For old Europe, America is a danger because not only does she fight a war against terrorism," but she proudly asserts her values and freedom." So I wrote her an email saying, "That's all true Mam. And its because of the Westbury Rebels, classes of 1962-1965."
About "hate." It presents as a lot of anger, but which has yet to have been otherwise healthily expressed. It gets bottled-up when successfully suppressed over the short run, and then repressed over the long haul. It can, then, meld with identity elements of the psych. And that fusion can become wastefully burdensome, except possibly for the visceralness it spawns sometimes when necessary, for example, while fighting for one's, or a country's, life. Some day, we'll probably need to rely upon a certain amount of hate, or quieted anger, other than just upon the reason that we wish would predominate the rest of our lives.
Regrettably, reasoning's not in control of this subject, or yet at the time of this writing. Because they are not Etiotropically-trained group facilitating psychotherapists, not many of the politic know how to respond to the new sharing-of-feelings approach helping the periodically downtroddens to get their way. But, not to despair; here is how to gain back some (control through reason), American style, at least as applies to emotionally confused people who become caught up in programs otherwise probably not suitable for them.
There are twenty-five hundred cults in America at last count (by Melanie Phillips). As Americans, you are free to join whichever one or bunch you like. That's not just your opportunity, but your right as well. We have no anti-cult join-up laws, although we'll probably worry about you if you get into what we believe may be a bad — or at least controversial — program. At the same time, the American people are not responsible for which ones you choose. So if you've signed up with a group that, no matter its Bill-of-Rights-protected spiritual manifestation, has also had a very well established and even still politically-inspired and extant innocents-killer component, that'd be your responsibility, including your having to work through the emotional consequences of such a decision and belonging to a prospectively, as in at least minimum, partially-anti-socially-oriented group.
We can empathize with your pain, which in the end is probably shame, given your predicament. However, we will not, except maybe for a little while (thanks to a few nice interfaith-understanding Christian and Jewish thinkers), enable it into projective defenses — allow you to blame this individual ontology-based collective because you didn't read the fine print in, say for example, the Sunnah's traditional (historical) registration and implementation contract with that organization's (Islam's) believers, followers, members.
Another way of saying it, if you hang out with people whose membership's Brothers keep blowing things up, and have been doing so, or the like, in some instances with other murderous tools (sawed off machettes) way before explosives were even developed, and particularly for the benefit of the same named deitized leader to which or whom you subscribe, eventually your feelings are going to get hurt, a lot, just through association with the pushy aspects of that (your overarching) group. And in the end, all attempts to convince those in your wider surroundings (non believers, kafirs, and etc.) to not see that your emporer is wearing no clothes — when he is the one who established the ideological dichotomy that ails you — is not going to save you from the pain of that organizational association and attendant systemically applied delusional requirements encumbering its umma. Your emporer-führer-originating-deep-thinker-in-charge, and to emphasize with its inclusion his contradictingly duplicitous ideology pervading your souls, IS naked to the rest of us; and inevitably worse for your probably increasingly sensitive sensibilities, not attractively so.
The West has already been through this fighting reformation of spiritual mindsets and citizenry control when unhinging Catholicism and Cromwellian-styled Protestantism from their trans-national-governmental power operations. That thousand-plus years of psychological analysis as applied to how we managed ourselves produced serious wars, lots of death and hardship, and splits in religio-ethnicity-based belief and the like. It also produced, since, at least, the eighteenth century Enlightenment, a group of people who refuse to be told how to think, pray, feel their own feelings, surmise critically about themselves and their environment, or to be pushed too far by those who've not been through our lessons learned.
So take heed, Islam. No matter how foolish, giddily apologetic for you, or worse (e.g. in the tank: through bribery, corruption treason, etc.) some of our more transitory leaders may look and even really be from time-to-time, this constituency (as a whole) didn't just roll off the back of the religio-psycho-politico-turnip-truck. Don't mistake its (our own good umma's) tolerance and understandings of the emotional pain you suffer — due to the politically aggressive component of your program's causing all this emotional havoc — to be weakness, or better yet, something easy for you to destroy for purposes of maintaining your own individual, relational and systemic psychopathologies.
That's not a policy based on hate, necessarily; but tough wisdom handed down from our own thousands of years of hard, as in also painful, albeit enlightened logically toward survival, anti-pathognomonic-group-management life experience.
There's Never Going to Be a Post Westbury Rebelism
Sitting on the deck of a Navy ship, the entrepid WWII correspondent, Robert Sherrod, observed the new generation of Marines before him. They were engaged in card games and "frivolous" goings on aboard the craft, according to this battle experienced reporter. Eventually, he commented that these later generation Marines were not of the character of the "Old Corps" he had witnessed on Guadalcanal in the fall of 1942. According to Sherrod, these new Americans, in this instance Marines, would not be able to stand up to the test that would come. It would demand something from within them that he surmised was not there. They were not like the previous generation.
The next morning, November 20, 1943, those new Marines boarded naval landing craft and headed for the beaches of Tarawa. Most of them would have to wade in a chest deep ocean between two and three hundred yards through heavy, that is HEAVY, infilade Japanese machinegun, and supported by enemy mortar and artllery, fire. The entire island chain was theirs, the second generation Marines of Tarawa, and later to be Saipan and then Iwo Jima, within three days, and at an enormous cost in human life on both sides.
Seven years after that generation landed at Tarawa and took that Island at the cost of such horrible carnage, the next generation of American service men, some of them Marine reservists who'd yet even been to boot camp, manned their rifles, machineguns and mortars and engaged overwhelming numbers of Chinese soldiers in the Battle of what our guys, that is, the people who had trained me, fondly called "The Frozen Chosin" in Korea. Later their sons, and their daughters as the nurses I referenced earlier, and don't forget our courageous Westbury Rebels like — to name a few — James Price Bell (class of 1964), Tommy Tucker (63), Mike Woods (62), Chuck DeRouen (63), Robert Carruthers (64) Jimmie Sanders (62) and our great heroic Navy Corpsman Gilbert Roger Bythewood, Jr. (65), would land in Vietnam.
That fighting spirit comes from our blood, not just from our training or in this essay's instance, the spirit of our mascot. Now, our descendents — our Rebels' children and next generation's family — Marine Captain Spencer McDonald (killed in the line duty, 1998), US Army Captain Andrew Houghton (killed in Action, 2004), Navy Lt. JG Clayton Hagerman, (thankfully alive, well and stoically, intelligently and graciously on duty in 2011), Jimmie and Linda Buck Sanders' son US Marine Lance Corporal Justin Sanders who is now serving in the Afghanistan theater of war, and as shown in Karon Houghton Mathews's (professional writer and graduate of our class of 1965) published article, our women who saved their brothers' and sisters' lives during the attack on the USS Cole, and then our neighbors who knowingly took Flight 93 into the ground as soon as they realized that they had become an Islamist's flying bomb headed for the Capital of the United States, have been and are today, whether in the spirit of our memories and love or in this life's reality, on guard, all defending the crux of our heritage: our definition of the value of the individual human being to which American, Texan, Mexican, African American, Indian, oriental immigrants and yes southern Rebels and even Yankees from Massachusetts, have all contributed.
And the wonderment? Our new heros, our children, have done and are doing all this while illness has encumbered my own abilities to make further contribution, and thus while the impetus of my later life has been relegated to not over-cooking my turkeys and ribs while upgrading the music playlists that are part of my fun hobby that I've enjoyed so much at WestburyHSHouston.com.
Social Conscience . . . Oh no!! You don't mean it?! Not Again!!!!
Where I enjoyed the previously referenced history article provided at The Friends of Westury High School, I did take exception with one statement. It referred to how the world developed a social conscience following the passing of our era. After 1954, some people began to empathize with ethnic differences. But that's been an onoging process for even longer than that, which is why I placed my favorite Rebel representing African Americans to me, Marian Anderson, on the music playlist. She sang that song at the Lincoln Monument in 1939. Regarding the concept of social conscience, no it didn't change and neither did it all of sudden develop something new, in this reference to social conscience implying that America's focus upon individuality was replaced by the wider social developmental understandings of this recent only two to three decades old era; they are in part underpinned by the conceptualization of social justice, which too is not new.
The classes of 1962-1965 and their fathers and mothers who fought the Korean and second world wars, and their grandfathers and grandmothers who fought for the principles embodied in the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and their great grandparents who waged the slug-fests called the Texas and American Revolution and Civil Wars were all on to something. They said that first and foremost we are individuals, and then from that reality we think, feel, and believe as we choose unless or until our behavior hurts others. Then, when conflict ensues where such hurtful and usually intrusively aggressive conduct occurs, it is restrained by the rest of us called the society. In this management model individual human ontology leads interpretitive guesswork-based social systemic managerial thinking, pulling the full social appartus along with the creativity that attends men and women who are free to think unencumbered by the controlling aspects of statis-, behavioral-based and social-spin economic and religious followers' beliefs in and of their corner-the-market of ideas and plans as to how to collectively achieve utopianism.
Although most non-socialist imbued writers and philosophers refer to utopianism as the fantasidal abstraction that undergirds the mass murder of whole populations, thus it is always bad and it is then ridiculed fairly repetitiously, I'm not implying in this essay the same: that utopia is always such an awful thing for which to shoot. Rather, I mean that 1) depending upon how one approaches it the notion can cause some serious harm and 2) a form of utopia's already available, in America that is.
When social conscience- and justice-based thinkers go after utopia, they are trying to remove pain and suffering from the polity that the observers-thinkers opine results from unfairness that comes from strong people exploiting dumb, underfunded, sometimes oppressed, and unlucky ones. Sounds like a good concept, on the surface. But the deficiency attending that construct is that pain and suffering provide individuals with neuromolecular capacity to learn (see neurology of ontology below) and the socialist's goal of and attempt through selling of its abstractions — "Some day when we achieve social utopia everything will be fine and there'll be no more pain" — for the purpose of removing that pain and suffering simultaneously removes that learning capacity. Nobody learns anything and the socialism-first construct eventually collapses, somewhat as did the old Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 and as will Europe soon enough.
Parenthetically speaking, so will we under the current debt social management apparatus being employed at the time of this writing. If that happens, we will go through some serious learning experiences both individually and collectively. In the mean time, the socialists will be arguing to change the US national anthem to "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" by Harry McClintock (from the movie Brother Where Art Thou). For the reader's convenience, I placed the song on the music playlist attending this web section.
Differently from the social processing format, in a true consensually- and US Constitution Bill of Rights-based comparable operating system, people and organizations are free to not just win but to also fail, to incur and thus experience loss, and to learn from it. That learning is comprised of repeated lessons in responsibility taking for our own analysis, study and pensive evaluation. Nobody relies on a planner to dole out our options or to even choose for us. It's hard; but we learn endurance and focus. And in that activity dumb people can and will become strong and even smart sometimes, depending upon their best and most valuable qualities. They are not intellect, but character and heart: courage, will, desire to learn, and to better themselves and to be raised up by those who share their lives and who care and love them while they are experiencing true hardship. True intellect will develop accordingly as support for the overall social and economic edification activity. And it's deep stuff; not four F management, that is, flake, fluff, frivolity and sometimes even fraud, that attends artificial serenity that is promoted to accompany collective seances. That opportunity to feel, to experience and then learn from loss, which is always attended by emotional pain and suffering and that usually includes some profound fear at times and then anger and even joy during reconciliation when it too occurs, is the true source of evolvement for humankind. It is life. And it means that no matter the devastation one experiences, he or she can find within all that is necessary to be reborn, to include doing so from within either the secular or non secular sense, and to strive then for all that is not just necessary, but what is good.
The social- conscious / -justice idea that our cause will be bettered some day by blaming those that have done well or been more fortunate than us lowereds, and then taking away from them to advance our downtrodden selves deprives us of the opportunity to learn from our experience — our pain and suffering. And when we do, we've achieved and experienced the true Utopia on Earth: the freedom to live life with all that it brings, sometimes good and others not so seemingly, but always as Us. Once a people learn that lesson as a culture and a civilization, and most particularly when volunteer — not forced or otherwise commanded through coercian — caring, love and magnanimity of and by some for our less than fortunates, that so gifted group of human beings can achieve anything they can think up and so want; and low or high IQs and trust babies have got nothing to do with the outcome.
Still doubt you are living in Utopia when just getting by in an American styled democracy? The soviet dissident Natan Sharansky was released from the Soviet Gulag in 1986, thanks be personally to President Reagan. Sharansky arrived in Israel within twenty-four hours of crossing the east to west bridge in Germany. His observations of freedom after no longer being encumbered by socialism's double think and coercians on how and what to be, and no matter his astonishment with the constant complaints of the inequalities and systemic unfairnesses by various factions comprising the democratic polity were: He said for all those social thinkers, pain projecters, group whiners and their exploiters in the world to hear, "I am now in 'utopia.' It is called individual freedom."
The advantages of those various personal capacities for human ADVANCEMENT spawned by either creativity or political interrogotories and contrivances to manipulate others through social fairness and balancing dialogue come from completely different elements of consciousness (later to be referenced as the integrative ontological functioning of the brain). For creativity to lead — to accomplish that for which it is designed — that conscience must be unencumbered by that part that becomes embroiled, bled off or otherwise misdirected to manipulation of political process. People, that is civilizations, that use that model begin problem solving with "How's this going to play in Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Turkestan, Uzbekistan or just less exotic plain old downtown Peoria, Illinois. As that social conscious model, which requires special erudite academic training in Machiavellianism and probably a Masters Degree or doctorate in Nietzsche's Advanced Personism to participate effectively in, much less to manage efficaciously, grows and matures at its height, its faux utopian ascendency, to be exposed finally as none other than just sorrowful old bureucracy. (And heck, Texans and other Americans just want to be left alone to play some golf, go fishing, or tend their gardens and yards, or to build a harmless empire back here at home — they've never even heard of Niccolo and Friedrich - they didn't know those guys were figuring all that stuff out.) That means that at its greatest achievement, its highest prospects for personal and social theoretical hope, the collective-first model fails, imploding eventually and inevitably of its own bloatedly gargantuan political stagnant morass.
Hence, the folks who thought up and then supported by their followers over the years the individual creativity-first, model said "We've got to get that big energy-draining inefficient thinking creativity-sundering conglomeration of inanity out of the way." (Actually, I said that, but only by summarizing what Americans over thirty-seven years of age and in the know have been expressing all their lives and throughout their heritages when contemplating and debating this issue.)
Then somebody else — I think it was the Chinese People's Republic Politburo, or whatever they call it now — said just recently "I have a socioeconomic idea. Let's try to construct the way we interact collectively around a system that strengthens the individual. If anybody can find one any more after everybody finished studying all those Little Red Book (Mao's as different from Hazelden's study guide for Chemical Dependency recovery) sayings and readings between the 1960s and 1980s, then we can use his or her creativity to innervate and thus carry those of us who are not so apparently gifted to advance the whole system — one that is always mostly logically reinventing itself through application of those individual gifts — along the path to overall happiness." "Good idea!" somebody from the same committee said. That made the really serious Machiavellian social justice-inspired thinkers happy, too, as that gave them something for which to look forward — there would be something or someone left to manipulate. The notion added a constant to the model; it always required an effort to figure out who had what and how to get it, which is one of the staples of social justice and its precursor social conscience thoughts. The Chinese are doing pretty well with that socialist contrived managed-individual (exploitation-based) model now, predicted to surpass American GNP by 2016.
During the democratization surges occuring in the totalitarian run mideast beginning in 2011, Chinese or the shorter guys Politburo (as distinguished visibly by history's photos of politburos by the first appartus' namesake that was governed by taller Russians) began to get concerned about controlling their own social conscious approach during the beginnings of the Jasmine Revolution. So that shorter Politburo announced that the movement away from social-justice and -conscience was "plotted by the United States behind the scenes.” No kidding; they are trapped in the past. Why would we do that while being faced possibly with losing our imperialist capitalist lead in a couple of years when we are mostly hoping they don't discover full out individual freedom? If that were to happen, we could be in deep competitive trouble over the long term given their four times plus population size advantage. Thank God they've knocked their reproduction (birth) rate per couple down to 1.1; they'll desolve and then devolve out all together in 225 years." So keep it up (meaning our 2.1 rate), America!
And, as Marx with Lenin's later edification long ago led this movement with their adage "Let the individuals with their creativity build the wealth and then we can just take it away from them!" "But while we are spreading it around, what do we get out of it?" said his disappointed proteges. "We get to be in charge so that we can reconfigure everybody to make them come out a little more perfect than the miserable lot that they are now!" So everybody was happy in those earlier thinkers' days with some even still today being exhilerated about their spreader activities. Think of "spreading the wealth around" as the distribution of fertilizer for mind reformation and control — a new way of being — from the always great altruist gardeners of humankind.
The Westbury history article's referenced social conscience is not just the schemes of deep thinkers, though, and anyway. In this current era of no depth it adds in Rodney King's wishful thinking approach to managing hard problems: "Can't we all get along?" Well, although I thought it was very nice of Rodney — having been beat all to hell by Los Angelos Police, California Highway Patrol and other assorted officers — to make that poignantly profound statement at the time of that particular upheaval, "Sorry, but in serious practice, no." Although some methodological functionary similarities do exist, not all — whether drug-, religious-, vegitarian-, environmental-, climate control hallucinaries- or social conscience-based individual identity usurping — cults are the same. Particularly "No," Rodney, in your referenced instance when burning down or blowing up a city, killing and maiming of one's neighbors and other innocents by poor-me-and-its-all-your-fault high or sometimes low end of the food chain killers' and political-commentator-through-murder ' philosophies and conduct are condoned and then pardoned as legitimate expressions of personal or collective upsettedness or maybe otherwise argued by the lethally insane to be necessary development of public awareness of their revolution-against-children-startup activities: Oklahoma City and Norway.
Neither, again for emphasis, do organizational declarations that lead to the same destruction, for historic examples, the tenets of Leninism, Islamism (the insightment to violence elements of the Sunnah), pre- Enlightenment Knoxism-Calvinism and pre Reformation Catholicism that direct(ed) their followers to be intolerant of others' beliefs and loves and basic rights to be an independently thinking human being and to care about and whom in the order of importance that they choose. Those top-to-down demogogically-promoted bureacracy-managed social fix ideologies and programs' — some of them posing as infallible because they are deified by either the "tyranny of the masses" (actually called "tyranny of the majority"), the never-wrong (according to its Swiss inventor Jean Rousseau) "General Will"of the polity, or some sixth to eighth rate prophet of God, purportedly — articles of incorporation, meaning you have to read their books to get the small print "Who-and-how-many-do-we-have-to-kill-to-get-this-done?" components of their charters, need to be scrutinized by intellectual Rebels. When Lenin asked that very question of his social management statistician, the answer was "Well, the numbers come in just under eighteen million; and 'who?' really doesn't matter; the sheer volume of the all-of-a-sudden missings will have such a chilling effect on the population as a whole that it should become readily compliant so that we can see if this social thing's gonna work out." "Sounds good to me." said Vladimir. And those two great big-picture fellows moved on it: pristine abstraction-refined social conscience experimentation and decision making at its finest.
Is there an interim moral here? Fight over with serious and confrontive dialogue and in the trenches of the open arena so that during analysis and decision making truth prevails over political correctness: again for an alternative and slightly different reference, the shallowly inane schmoozing but always psychologically-based Stockholm Syndrome-underpinned approach for addressing thought differences and conflicts as western so-called intellectuals enabled the Bolsheviks' population-psych-control-through-random-extermination program was being implemented.
"But that's not fair trying to hang those old days' start up sins on us newby social conscience and justice thinkers and our academic supporters. We are new and improved through edification; we can look back on things and find tons of greedy uncooperating captains of capitalism to blame most negative histories on. We study stuff and believe in individual human rights even, particularly when we can use them to advance our more evolved socially-inspired take-over programs."
Oh? You are living in delusion and erudition has nothing to do with it. Believe not? Look to the Sudan and other poor elements of Africa where those socialist-Islamist merger managed bright spots are rolling over millions while academic Europe and America head out for their after-conference happy hours to talk it all over.
"Well Skippy, that's just too much prejudice and expression of inner hostiality (new word parodying hysterical mind controllers who try to dumb down natural feelings of anger in response to collective encroachments on the individual mind) directed toward such an important and otherwise believed to be credible segment of our professional population. The only legitable (another new word) targets for expression of righteous hostiality today are those created in and supported by the business schools, for example globalized corporations which are colonizing less fortunates abroad and the empire building-based philosophically dominated American military who are paving the way! You should be careful or you may even be thought of as a hateful thinker if you start expressing anger toward the wrong groups, like ours!" say the old remnants of the New Left guys embedded in academia more prolifically today than was the western press into our military units during the three week long set piece battle component of the 2003, Iraq War.
And I liked to see that. It took real courage for those news men and women to join up in that fight. And they, excluding Al Jezeera and British media turncoats, did it without exploiting the war trauma our fighting combatants were experiencing as did their predecessor counterparts during Vietnam.
No doubt. I don't dislike any of that class of folks (academies) personally, because I don't know that many of them individually any longer. But I do literally and without equivocation or other ambivalence hate the idea of and methodology for hiding the individual and collective cowardice of a group behind intellectual rationalizations and diversions from the primary issue of the time, in this reference the failure to face a hideous socialist-Islamic management model that is responsible for murdering two million and more black Africans, most of them just because they were Christians. And it wouldn't matter to me if they weren't Christians, but instead Jews, Muslims, Buddhists or Animas. Standing by and just shooting the breeze about superfluous issues like so called economic social justice, and medicating that fear-based cowardice with Martinis or whatever is the drug of choice today in academic settings made safe by the constituency — the US Armed Forces — that they most rail about to boot, while innocent people are being killed in mass, and when they otherwise could be defended with a simple platoon of Marines like the one in which I served, swells anger and when I'm lucky rage in my chest and makes me sickenedly ashamed of those delusional managerial thought constructs attending and remaking that once honored and esteemed scholarly profession, literally destroying its secular-based holiest of aims and purposes, seeking and standing up for truth, during the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries. Welcome Big Thinker trainee-students, to the ivy covered halls of Hadleyville.
This author knows first hand the experience of being murdered. It is shaky business to the core; and it is an especially bad way to depart this life, as at the moment just preceding transition everything that has gone into the valued making of the character and identity of the murderee is stripped from the consciousness in those last seconds. Let me assure you that coming back for such fortunates as was I from the process of dying so unceremoniously is not just growth-producing, but epiphanologically life changing. I have dedicated myself to stopping that way of passing, which I inevitably will do, given that providence agrees. So you see I have nearly utopian kinds of dreams too, which is why I don't condescend to some Big Thinkers' hopes and aspirations for the well being of mankind; notice, please, that I didn't use "human"kind, as I'm not sure yet that women probably need any advancement, except of course most probably in their marital relationships with men. And that stopping starts with the ending of institutionalized whimpedness that allows the horror to keep happening. But that, unlike this enjoyment that I've experienced in these light-hearted essays penned at WestburyHSHouston.com, represents the predominant thesis of my own work; it's another book about which I do not now have the time in this fun interlude to discuss.
Mark Steyn, who is both the Westbury humorist Billie Friesen and Bob Hope of demographic studies, explains a change from the way some of our parents used cliches to address Soviet expansionism from today's new tropes for consideration of how to address uncomfortable goings on. In the former our parents after learning the disquieting lessons of 1930s and 40s about collective denial said
"Better dead than red."
But it, according to Steyn has been replaced today with
"Better screwed than rude."
If Steyn is right and there has been a little change in the wrong direction going on here, reverse that trend and learn from the lessons experienced by your grandparents before it is too late. Fight these serious ideological contrasting battles out honestly and forthrightly with pen, typewriters, spoken debate, rigorous research-analysis, study and reason before they have to be fought out with automatic weapons, artillery and vast machines that destroy even more innocents who don't even know what the debate is about. And watching those arguments being waged as entertainment on TV and in the print media is not enough to save what you value. In these kinds of constitutional-level conflicts, you'll eventually have to study the source materials yourself, do your research duty, make up your own mind, and when the time comes for the expression of yourself and beliefs, do them both, not just to win the particular battle in which you are engaged, as neither that nor a series of winning achievements are the end product, but with the honor that most profoundly represents who you truly are at that place in your life. Honor, a concept attacked forthrightly just following our era of the Westbury Rebels, fits the construction of the good rebel as magnificent stalwart consciousness becomes embodied by the heart.
Furthermore, the social conscience concept is hardly new to this last hundred years. Jefferson argued (with his fellow revolutionary Rebel, John Adams) during the 1790s "Reign of Terror" for the approach being used by the French as the Rousseau-inspired social thinking masses slaughtered (excuse me, meaning executed) each newby set of leaders who unfortunately rose to the top, or was it to the bottom?, so quickly. Trying to figure out how the Americans achieved their new social conscience based on individual freedom, that Swiss philosopher cut the mustard and concluded something like "Well, if Frenchmen aren't ready to be free, then we'll just have to force them to be." Top-down thinkers trying to make the transition from description to precription (meaning making the transition from objective observers of the big scene to trying to make things come out right during implementation), not always an easy career change for philosophers and historians to make, and who were restricted to the study of only Behaviorism (it dovetails with academic abstractions conjured more easily from and within the tower; think I'm kidding? Karl Marx never had a job.) as the only management modality (prescription) available for fixing things — getting human beings to pretty much do what the rulers' want — always miss the point.
Jefferson, who while in Europe with John Adams had gotten along better with the French thinkers than had Adams, thought and posited that in this more social conscience model that no matter that the individual intellects comprising the masses were not too bright, in their eventual collective wisdom the decision making process, sometimes called mob-rule when getting out of hand, would purge, although regrettably usually with a little blood and carnage, pretty much all leaders who the General Will surmised, if not fully destined, were to become king-like tyrants, making these more abrupt kinds of transitions about every twenty years or so. That opined Jefferson was just the rightful natural process of masses mass management. Adams, at the time Vice President under Washington, didn't see it that way — thanks be to providence or whomever (probably Abigail) — and the social conscience could get it wrong from time to time.
Benjamin Franklin, at least according to the quote attributed to him that has circulated the Internet over the years, summarizes the issue pertaining to the collision between social conscience and social justice manifestations in organized community management approaches and the rights of the individual representing the minority.
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
There needed to be more balance struck that curtailed social thinking styled carried-awayism. The answer was the Bill of Rights which guaranteed through the US Constitution individual rights that could not be graded over my ever capricious, meaning changing hourly, whims of collective thought. In those circumstances, when the collective conscious got into pain, its answer was to solve the problem with "Hey. Gimme what you got!" that is, if anybody had anything left for the current collective pathology to steal or otherwise blame and then beat up on.
At the American - Texan - Westbury Rebel core are mathematics, genes, and a few statistically allocated chromosomes. Europe and Asia, where the latter included what was once called the far East, were comprised of people who were born with and into the social conscience melee. That is, people would follow what everybody else in their culture said, no matter that it was sometimes confused by contradicting mores, and even periodically causal of harsh conflict. That was the go-long-with-the-ruling-perspective approach whether the extended contracts ran for a millennium or two. The get-along guided village, town, city, state, nation or continent notion was to clan up and follow whatever the collective dictate, whether it was the Pope, Caliphate, king, feudal lords, new wave protestantism, or the emporer dynasty which was doing the dictating, telling the proverbial sheep-brains (sorry for the insult to sheep) who to love and marry, who to show fealty to, and all for the purpose of having someone then to take care of the compliant person's needs, the trade off being collective-shared thought, or just following of directions, for the comfort of no-risk living in serentity.
Except in one place: America. It became the world's vacant lot for the repository of the odd-man-out neuromolecular structures who somehow didn't care what the preponderance wanted, directed or otherwise ordered. There was barely anything collective at all about this percentile's conscience that migrated here, and then out west, where some of whom settled Texas. They've just been the world's small statistical sample of people who didn't want anyone taking care of them, planning their lives so they could choose their own life mate instead of the parents or the village elders or the feudal lord doing it for them, or just signing up to be somebody's good old endentured slave until they earned or fought their way out of that kind of system.
When America won its independence from the King and the dictates of the churches of England and the rest of the religious world — even though some of those configurations were trying to adapt to this new seemingly non sheep-based way of thinking — it won that individual freedom conscience mindset away from all the world's social thinkers who had previously tried to dominate these now independent reposits and what their pioneering American and Texan forefathers had left to them. We marry whom WE want to marry. We do business with whom WE want to do business. We have mutual consent sex with whom we want and how we want to do it and particularly without regard for the instructions of a seventh century pediphilliac on what some Allah said about the propiety of discovering sexual intimacy with nine year old children. We pray to and with whom WE want to pray and in the direction that we choose; or we DON'T pray as we also elect. And social class identity and persona values are based on hard work, diligence to determine and do good, creativity, some providence, the willingness to take risks, sometimes great ones — and how we suck it up and learn from our loss when it happens instead of blaming somebody else for the theoretical unfairnesses attending economic ventures — and perseverance to aspire to become the best that one can extract from one's self, instead of a fluke of birth order.
After a couple of hundred years of settling in this new place, Americans didn't even like the idea of necessarily electing one of their neighbors to be king or queen for a day, or month, or for two or four years. Some of those neighbors studying their ancestors' across the waters' ways of doing things would change in those configurations and sponge up to the power always available for discovery in collective control and start becoming infected by that old European - Asian disease. The changed person to politician — which rarely occurred in Texas as most of ours volunteered as dedicated helpers doing their duty for their neighbors — began to believe that managing others was an inaliable and even ordained right that attends being a big thinker. But at least those kinds of new imposers could be fired if they became affected by social conscience management carried-awayism.
This new individual mindset was born out of the world's minorities who's genes and chromosomes just wouldn't go along with the centuries of dictates as to how to Be. They've streamed over the centuries out of the Europes, Asias, Indias and Africas of the planet to come to this strangely and uniquely free place. As they discovered individual personhood and its identity in the new America's countrysides, on the farms in the back country, and during the isolations on the western plains, in the mountains and even from the urban ghettos, they also discovered the truth of the human consciousness. It's a neat thing that's not for sale or the taking by wishful thinking new social ideas exploiters, at least without a serious fight. And from that special laboratory they produced a new understanding of the full human being and how it best functioned. In this discovery, these heroes, instead of making deals with tyrants to include compliance with the hand-me-down socially dictated traditions from previous cultures for their peace of mind and security, upon following what they were and what they had discovered themselves to be in their independent struggles and as they felt it inside, meaning individually and then collectively only as they chose to care about the others. Those others referred to their neighbors who were sharing the hardships that were teaching them these profound lessons about how the REAL human consciousness works.
Inner self was in and social conscience was out, depending on the natural love that people can and do have for their neighbors and their community. That social conscience then was always given from the individual heart and no more from the easily manipulated statistical imposition to which the sheep-like mind's of Eurasia could become so susceptible to control by those who would orchestrate these great thought management smothering symphonies.
The concept of the Rebel became the guiding impulse from that convergence of heart and mind that always said "Hold it! You've gone too far with your social justice theories of how we are going to be here. Those tires have already been kicked long ago by more dedicated social thinkers than you new guys of today. I am going to Be who I am first and always; and if there is going to be any adaptation to be made, it's going to be done by you social conscience management theorists, not by my heart. So stand down socialist engineers and thinkers! You've met the Westbury Rebel; none of them surrender neither their hearts and minds nor their creativities to anyone unless we want to surrender!" And as the character Ethan, actually Amos, respectively, in the movie / book The Searchers throughout his and his young partner's (Martin) trek around the great Southwest said "That'll be the day!"
No wonder Americans, Texans and Westburians are seen by the rest of the world, and particularly our European friends that we left long ago, as an insubordinate and mostly unmanageable lot. The English even once called us barbarians; actually that was last week, and usually only when we put a Texan or two in the Whitehouse. I guess maybe we are to a certain degree. And if being non social justice-oriented barbaric means not letting some desert Bedouin-designed legal control model called shariah trump administration of western civilization principles of common law founded and always supported in our covenants — the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights as embodied and ammended in the United States of America's and Texas's state Constitutions — as that identity-stealing woman-hating nonbelievers-conquering Islamic legal creed is now doing in the new social conscious-inspired, multiculturally managed Britain, then thanks be to the Rebel in us all. If I wasn't so grounded in logic, reason and critical thought, and simultaneously enamored with investigative journalistic styled inquiry all the time, I might think this American, Texan, Westbury Rebel's saving grace for humankind was practically a spiritual — as in ontological — level epiphanilogical experience.
And so it was done between Jefferson and Adams. The constitutional process hammered out and ratified over the previous decade of the 1780s stayed put without the social conscience encumbered thought model. There's a little more to this history. But the brief point is that the social conscience battle has already been fought out and proved up, thanks be in no small part to the hardships suffered by the ever managerially inept not to mention often loony French; excluding Westbury High School's Dubois brothers, (Paul in 1964, Pierre from 1965, and Tim in 1972) and their family, and of course the creators of my all time favorite musical Les Miserables. Those two (for our classes) Westbury young men always knew what they were doing, adding a great deal to our small and youthful community in Texas. And we appreciate the great freedom fighter General LaFayette and the other five thousand troops the French loaned us to take down the otherwise believed to be undefeatable Cornwallis at Yorktown in 81 (1781, that is). Incidentally, LaFayette, who said "America will someday save the world!" was — after helping us to win our freedom here — imprisoned upon return to France with his lovely wife (till she nearly died) by the French mass management system in no less than Czechoslovakia. And I almost forgot; there is one more stand out produced by the French, albeit a little too religious for me personally — but that's no matter — the foremost example of Strategic Human Ontological Management in application has been provided by non other than the all time magnificent Joan of Arc; thanks be to all that's good in the world for producing that astonishing woman. Too bad she got burned up by the religious formated social control protectors of that fifteenth century era (the jurists and executioners were mostly British, as the story goes). She would have been a good Westbury Rebel. And we'd have adopted her right along with the DuBois brothers in a nanosecond. Other than those noted special contributions to humankind, though, that part of the Continent adds more than its share of non sequiturs to the ever ongoing as in apparently infinite parade of European philosophers' human management conjurings.
Note please, that one of France's greatest literary heroes, Victor Hugo (two million men attended his funeral in 1885), surrendered his protagonists from trying to transform France's society into a truly free place by getting them travel tickets as they said goodbye to their respective adopting father and father-in-law, Jean Valjean, to another country across the long waters. And, it wasn't Banglidesh. The author just couldn't figure out how to get his country to the managerial level to which they aspired, so gave up at the end and said "I guess we need to escape to that free place, and get a new start." Then, the musical which is still running after twenty-five years and having played in myriad languages to millions and millions of people all over the world gives you the means for defining freedom: "Look to America!"
Maybe the French aren't all that loony — at least all of the time — after all. I'll never concede though, that they don't still have their historic moments.
When it comes to discussions between differently managed parties, some representation systems, and despite the contributions of the "Noble Savagists" of the seventeenth century writers — they are the originators of today's multiculturalism notions — are flat pathological. To take an example from the current scene and particularly the last couple of centuries, nobody is going to get along with the REAL Islam, the current best benefitter of the Noble Savage's run until that political management ideology, which is nothing more than deitized Behaviorism, undergoes the same rigorous boundary setting reformation that misunderstanders of Christian teachings had to undergo during the eighteenth century and as Marx had to be confronted by the same until and during the twentieth. Those groups only lasted as long as they did because of the intellectuals', which Lenin dubbed "useful idiots", we-can-all-get-along-no-matter-what-is-being-thought-and-said constructs. "That is, we can't achieve our model's goal of living happily ever after without sacrificing a couple of billion individual thinkers here and there. Somebody's got to go, at least until we all think the same — meaning our way."
The fathers and mothers of the Westbury High School classes of 1962-1965 had the chance to experience on the global scene notion of social conscience between the two great world wars of the twentieth century. It was called "Peace at all cost" and set to the tune and lyrics of Kumbaya the delusional method adopted to help millions cope with the horrors of WWI. But in that coping and no doubt necessary effort the administrators of that management thesis of denial created the even more catastrophic tragedy of WWII. While our pacifists and collective we-don't-want-to-be-involved-Ostrich's-head-in-the-sand choirs were singing "We Are The World" in three part harmony, the psychopaths sucked up or blew into oblivian everything that was good and innocent — the latter being social managerial naivety-caused — right up to the choir loft.
So what does this view taking on the abstraction referenced as social conscience mean for practical social discourse? Speaking sermonically, get rid of those compatibilility emphasized management theorems that strive at nearly all costs to encumber debate, hurt feelings or no. Although there's good room for seeing the commonalities in people's adapted philosophical and ideological operating systems, just don't let that desire for comaraderie rule the roost. Instead, start out looking for the truth — as our parents learned from having eschewed study of the philosophies underpinning the folks who nearly ruled the earth forever, you have to study those core beliefs of those would-be world conquerers before they take too much of it — and particularly not be guided by an axiomatic management get-along-with-everybody method that rewrites facts and other history components for the purpose of changing them to meet today's new comfort zones for relationship happiness. Better to slug out at the onset strategic calamitous-assuring constitutional-level differences with words, logic and reason than obfuscate them till death and annihilation of whole peoples is required to settle matters. Emotional discomfort is a much more advanced condition than being dead.
Rationalize declarational level conflicts at the risk that the horrid costs will be that social murder, mahem and catastrophic destruction eventually predominate even our own little and ever growing smaller safe havens. That is, when the Facist-Nazi speakers, the Marxists-Leninists and the Islamists say in their books that document their programs' intents, purposes and methods that they are going to eat you if you don't think as they tell you to, then believe them! Don't make up little slogans based on how Happy Faces require that you see those statements, but on fact and truth, no matter how painful those truths are to look at squarely and wholly.
The great Nobel Laureatte and neuroscientist, Eric Kandel while consolidating the history of molecular learning in Aplysia (In Search of Memory, 2007) described the value of being wrong in debate, particularly at the cutting edge of the use of logic: Science. He told the story of the value of being wrong, sometimes. While on sabaticals in New Zealand immediately following WWII, and both men along with most of the intelligent jewish scientific world being on the lamb from Nazism, which would have killed either without blinking, (K)Carl Popper and neuroscientis John Eccles discussed the value of argument, and particularly the concept of being wrong attending scientific discussion. Eccles was disappointed, even despondent that he had been wrong regarding what was responsible, either electrical or chemical transmissions, for communications between neurons and so forth. And Popper, apparently having had some existentially oriented psychological training strengthened Eccles' morale by exclaiming the value of arguing or in this essay's thesis being a Westbury Rebel, whether or not you always know what you are doing.
The battle between ideas as Popper opined for Eccles' benefit sharpens the focus into great clarity. Who was right or wrong, although possibly exhilarating or embarrassing depending on what side one is on, doesn't always matter as much as the debate that allowed, facilitated and brought about the additional clarification — the addition and confirmation of truth. So even arguments or hypotheses later thought of as negative and non beneficial because they turned out to be inaccurate, can and are found to be necessary to the process of understanding all of our selves. That's how we do better, and advance the whole show. We never get to that advanced state by playing like discord or disparitness don't exists.
THEY DO and therein lies our opportunity to discover and to manage ourselves, as long as we employ a couple of defensive rules. Forget about ad hominems as fighting tools and stop by not participating in personal defamation. Try not to be mean. And for God's sake don't kill anybody, or at least those who don't deserve it (that is, if you have maniacal tendencies or notions while trying to reconcile ideological conflict, try to hold off doing others physically until just before they let fly with their satchel charges). Those attack-the-personhood kinds of models for debate and murdering disagree-ers, and particularly showboating murders of our most innocent just for effect are wasted — even though sometimes they appear to have near-term political gain with the masses and academes for you psychopaths — activities, at least in the long run or final outcome.
Get to the issues of the arguments, lay them out as accurately as you can, given that you no doubt will carry your own prejudices and passions into the affair, and face yourself and your adversaries with courage. Learn what we all do if lucky, that sometimes the adversaries and ourselves are the same. Ha, and sometimes they are not!! So good luck in determining what is best for you and your - our world. The Rebel will lead you in this guargantuan fight but equally noble struggle for goodness.
In the end, I know that if you went or go to Westbury High School in Texas, America, and especially if you are the kind of person who aspires to win the honorable Westbury (Mr.) Burns Award, you'll eventually get the point and do the right Rebel thing. And that point in this section has been that although there is considerable value in the concept of social conscience, the Rebel — the focus of this article — is the anti-thetical construct to the mass delusion that can lead so-called social conscience collective thought into hysterically imbued mass calamity. The Rebel says "Think individually. Take pride in your and others' uniquenesses. Evaluate what thought competitors are saying to you. Care for and defend with legitimate debate methods — not the ad hominem-only-focused defamational styled cliche dominant bickering attending soundbytes on TV — your cherished values and beliefs, your families, your other loved ones, your good neighbors, your country and your own lives." And when you discover that after all is said and done that you may be or worse likely are wrong, then admit it, take your persona-beating for a while, learn from it, and then get back in the fight — but this time do your homework and study harder and especially do it all from the heart, which makes everything come out right.
That fellow visiting in New Zealand, John Eccles, had to do just that, admitting his championed thought about neuro synaptic transmission of the original axon's action potential being electrical as opposed to chemical was wrong. But he came back harder than ever eventually winning four decades later the Nobel award for his incredible work and contributions to neuro-biology and neuro-science.
This Westbury Rebel concludes "That's the best social conscience invented for humankind over the past several thousand or so years. It was given to you by the American and Texas Rebel heritage which came before you. Honor it by treating it with respect and dignity and passing it on to those who will follow."
Now that you know my prejudices about social- versus individual-ism thought construction and functioning, whether either is secular- or non secular-based, please do know that they do not stifle my admiration and appreciation for the woman who provided the means for producing and publishing the componenent of the referenced history article with which I've taken exception in this section. She is, Ms. Rita Woodward, who I believe to be the greatest contribution to the Rebels. She is the founder and leader of The Friends of Westbury High School. And, aside from Mr. Burns and Mr. Gupton, both of whom I knew very well, she may be the finest exemplification of our heritage to gift that community over this last half century.
Neuro-Endocrine Substrate of Being for
Americans, Texans, and Westbury Rebels
Let me explain why this section has been included. Over thirty years ago I constructed a trauma resolution clinical and management model that focused not on behavior, as did the preponderance of the competition, but on the etiology of trauma. It was located in identity, which is what this essay is about. Trauma's etiology is not locused in behavior as mistakenly argued is the case by Cognitive Behaviorally-based clinicians. Ten years later I would produce the first neurological treatise on that etiology and resolution. Both works supported the ideological concepts built into America's originating documents as to how we would see and manage ourselves. I've known this for many years - over a third of a century. But this information hasn't worked its way into the public sector as I have only focused upon the narrow professional world for discussion of this ever so important issue to humankind. Hence, I'm adding a part of that information here because it supports this editorial's thesis regarding the importance of what this class has done with its lives, your life. (The Etiotropic Theory of the Neuro-Endrocine Substrate of Individual Human Ontology is set out in its own table, allowing for perusal where the level of interest inquires.) Please also note that traditionally, individual human ontology, identity and trauma's etiology have predominantly been the domain of spiritual and or religious interpretation. Because I do not consider that approach or my interfaces with it here does not mean that I disavow its thesis, value or contribution to humankind and particularly the reader, you. I do value it greatly. Thank you for letting me explain why I've included this part of my life into this document about the American, Texan and Westbury High School Rebel. |
America's and Texas's discussion, debate and political path, to include delineation of the role of the striving, even fighting when required activity, symbollically represented by the various Rebels from our history, is supported by the realities of the molecular functioning of both the individual and collective human substrate. It does not respond sequiturely over time to competitive thought models that are periodically employed by hierarchically management scaffoldings: those that attempt to impose identity through analytical interpretative and behavioral applications, respectively hallucinatory-induced intellectual fraud-trickery and forced thought control through behavioral modification techniques, at least as the latter are so imposed upon the (non criminal elements) ordinary human consciousness comprising the polity.
Summary Etiotropic Theory of the Introduction Individual ontology, referenced here as the essence of being human, functions out of the brain's phylogenetic capacity to integrate the organism not just for survival but for expanding itself, making itself more. That ontology is comprised of several elements: molecular learning represented in the neural modulation of synaptic underpinnings (substrate) of existential components of identity; caring; systemic use, application and implementation of caring; will; creativity; functional compartmentalization of memory storage; feeling states and individual emotions; and the ability to reason during and for decision making. Simplifying for this summary, "identity" in this explanation - definition of human ontology (essence) refers to values, beliefs, images and other realities and with an emphasis on existential — referring to those pertaining to the continuity of life or instead to the prospective ending of it — which then produce moral values, etc." Components of the Neuro-Endocrine Substrate of Human Ontology The phylogenetic brain integrative process beginning of the integrative molecular activity is housed in the interplays between both Long Term Potentiation (LTP) and Long Term Depression (LTD and not to be confused with the term clinical depression) of synaptic processes, the molecular storage units for learning and memory. That activity is in turn facilitated by the HAPA (Hypothalamus - Adrenal - Pituitary - Axis) or behaviorally termed Stress Response. During neural and endocrine activity stimulated by the changes confronting the identity stored in the synapse, the neurotransmitter systems, for example and principally, the Noradrenergic, Opioid and Glutamate systems accord the brain the plasticity (morphological changing of old and the engendering of new synapases and their functional strengthenings necessary for the changes in synaptic LTP and LTD and their interactions with genetic encoders to take place. Attending the molecular learning process, Noradrenergic modulated (of Opioid system) bindings or not (failures to bind) on predominantly Opioid post synaptic membrane receptors presents behaviorally as emotional pain, summarized here as various and cyclically presenting levels of grief, the intensity of which is determined by the amount of morphological LTP and LTD required during the brain integration effort. Thus emotional pain experienced behaviorally in response to loss (for example, changes in reality to identity - loss of a loved one) is fundamentally instrumental to and facilitative of molecular and thus its manifestation through behavioral learning. To the other side of learning where expansion of capacity to Be occurs, the same neurotransmitter systems facilitate, but in conjunction with others like the Serotonergic, Dopaminergic and Endorphin systems support the integrative activity. Twenty years ago, fifty differing neurotransmitters were identified as interacting with the brain's integrative functionings. There are more recognized today. That is the gist of the simple description of molecular learning, but which is made complex by numerous other neuro system participations and redundant operational mechanisms which have to do with not just functioning but locations of the integrative activities. Studying the brain has been analogized by its investigators as nothing less than being comparable to the exploration of space. I realize that you likely all know these things regarding the substrate of memory and learning — old news for now going on two to three decades of brain study. Related to my work, I wrote a book on the subject at that earlier time, which is why I know a lot about it, needing to be precise about both its functionings and their meanings as an element of meeting my responsibilities in my professional training and teaching activities. Even though I did most of the original study twenty years ago (1991-1994), continuous research affirms that the same principles still hold today. Better than that, new neuro-philosophers are hammering out additional and much more complex descriptions of the closely related processes to those considered in this sketch. What is not as well-known is the means through which that biogenetic composition manifest as the quality of caring. I have concluded over these years that that phenomenon is a function also of the phylogenetic integrative aspects of the brain's biology which is particular to each organism. In this use of that term (care), I am referring not yet to its extended manifestation in interpersonal relationships, which that use as described next is eventually one that rather refers here primarily to the phenomenon as an impetus for application of Being. Aside from the term "impetus," we can use another clarifying word: impulse, and not reactionarily as in a behaviorally considered fight or flight response to a stressor, for example, as an electronic shock to the tail of a snail which culminates in the retraction of the animal's gill used for breathing underwater. Caring provides human ontology with the trait (also meaning capacity) recently being referenced but not limited to the concept of Intelligent Design. No matter that some theoreticians for polemical purposes demean that term — they think it is just a replacement argument for the theory of Creationism — as the extraordinary philosopher and journalist Melanie Phillips iterates, and with which I've agreed, it is a more logical explanation of that which is otherwise unexplainable regarding the essential functionality of some cellular activity than anything else around. Regardless of the final cellular epistemology of this ontological element to be discovered, caring in this use is more than a behaviorally learned concept. And it goes to the heart of the phylogenetic integrator functioning of the brain which pretty much everyone in the know — like me — agrees. That activity, caring, then facilitates that integration based upon its both common and unique construction to draw from other (persons) also similar but equally unique manifestations comprising the human being. It accounts for such psychological capacities used in system management as empathy, projection, identity fusion and transference — natural experiences of the human interpersonal processes ongoing at virtually all stratifications of intrapsychic (individual - personal), interactional (individual relationships such as couples) and systemic (multiple relationships as in families, organizations, cultures and nations) existences. That force, caring, for doing that job most perfectly is vested — genetically engineered — within each and all of those systems as they function both independently and relationally. The biological substrates for caring and identity manifest behaviorally through the measurement of the concept of will. It of course can be given up, taken from us through horrendous and usually long term stress, or added back through the interpersonally applied gift of caring from others. Being conscientious to clarify the differences between will and caring and thus their roles, "will" occurs and subsequently exists in direct proportion to the ebb and flow of the synaptic changes that underpin identity. Striking down identity through whatever measures — self or externally imposed behavioral contradictions to that molecular storage — simultaneously depreciates will, but depending on the caring capacity of that ontology of the affected entity, not without a struggle, through LTD (Long Term Depression) of the synapse (memory traces). LTD is also referenced as, that is plays the fundamental role in, the molecular extinction of the synaptic traces that comprise the identity being lessened. But no matter declination of will, caring — although it may lose its brightness or visibility — remains as a thread of the phylogenetic brain integrative intelligence guiding the organism, doing so until its biological end-death. As my work with trauma victims whose identities have been more devastated than is comprehendibly conveyable through cognitive or didactic story telling, that caring thread continues to exist at a depth that is not conceivable to objectified exploration or inquiry. That is, no matter its appearance of complete sundrance, like an ember buried in the ashes of an old and seemingly dead camp fire it is still there to bring the human consciousness back; and it responds and becomes invigorated when not-as-so-affected outsiders' caring, which is most often experienced as — and very may well be — divine intervention as it reaches in through others to participate in the restoration of the identity and will. The former is often and otherwise believed incorrectly by many to be unrecoverable or not restorable. But it always is so if those surrounding the persons who've been hurt understand and know how to respond most effectively to the human ontological composition. That activity, recovery or uplifting is augmented by a fifth element of human ontology: creativity. Thus art coming in the forms of visual replications (paintings, photography, graphic story telling as in stage plays and movies) of life, music and literature interface, facilitate and interchange or otherwise communicate well with the identity elements of ontology to assist in its restoration or other strengthenings of the whole. Where epiphanological experiences originate with the referenced molecular learning activity, they get their wave- and rocket-like rides out of creativity, which regrettably no one quite yet knows the molecular source. At least we can know that its origin or fundamental components derive from the accelerated LTP of the synapse. But saying again for emphasis, when seemingly irreversibly sundered by horrific-traumatic events, and nevertheless the degree of that depreciation, identity is always recoverable - restorable no matter the negative views attending ignorance of the ontological delineation and functioning of these natural biological attributes of the physical human consciousness; creativity through the experience of epiphanies can play a magnificent role in that restoration. And for many, even most, the behavioral manifestation is of, again, intervention by an influence invariably appearing to be greater than the oft referenced self. An additional two biological elements of human ontology pertinent to this discussion include the means and manner through which the brain integrative process compartmentalizes its integrative activities and the most common but not always clearly delineated manifestation of feeling and its attendant states. In the former, the brain uses its cerebral or abstract thinking capacities to organize or store elements of the integrative process. There's so much that bombards it that some of the memory and experience referenced so far is stored eventually as unrecalled. The shifting of memory from short term to long term, respectively from the mossy fibers of the Hippocampus to the Cortex decreases many of those memories' recollectibility. But it is all still there, maintained eidetically, to mean recallable as if a movie or photographic images. The conscious ticket into that recall is supplied by the magnificent contribution of the Limbic system. It provides for experiences that function as protective states against too rapid a change to identity. They come in the form of shock, numbness and disbelief. Endogenous Opioid neurotransmitters' bindings on post synaptic Opioid system membrane's receptors underpin those states providing for the identity's transition to the new reality. The Limbus gives the location and basis for the molecular response that when identified consciously provides for the feeling delineation's essentials: mad, glad, sad and afraid. And they can and are expanded, depending upon the degree of stimulation or nature of the identity change to include terror and horror; embarrassment and great shame; anger and rage; profound guilt, sorrow and loss; and if we live right or are lucky, happiness and immense joy. One primary benefit to the brain integrative activity of these experiences is that they lead into that referenced storage area, sometimes termed the vast unconscious, presenting us with a path to and for the conscious determination of the identity changes undergone. That leads to reconciliation, restoration and satisfaction-comfort. Re-strengthening of will completes and is one of the fine benefits of the whole phylogenetically directed brain integrative identity restorative or uplifting cycle, depending upon the circumstances attending the change. Although marshaling information so that it may be compared for the purpose of reaching a decision takes the organism far into the abstract, the substrate or neuro functioning of which stems from the Cerebellum - Cortex and thus seemingly away from its core being, that trait nevertheless influences constructively that essence of existence. A problem for observers of the ontological definitional process is that this abstract (cerebral) capacity sometimes appears to be the all of being, which is far from an accurate interpretation. And this reasoning is seen to set humans apart from other living organisms (meaning primarily other people). It is that apartness that often results behaviorally in this brain integrative element appearing to predominate over its other components. But that appearance is actually a function of the earlier referenced compartmentalization that supports the full molecular learning activity. Interpretations of how this molecular interactivity occurs within the complete integrative neural procedures are both born out of the learning effort and part and parcel will influence its effectiveness or non upon, by and in conjunction with the whole of individual ontology, making its definition a struggle. From Molecular Learning to Thought: Historic Philosophical and Management Outcomes of Compartmentalization Thesis: Since the beginning of Greek philosophical thought, to include the works of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, Western Civilization philosophy and the majority of management methodology which respectively defines and advises how to manage the human consciousness and society has been generated out of the referenced (above) compartmentalization process which in turn has been affected by traumatic events. The philosophies, with the exception of the explanations provided by a few sophiths and the deity known as Jesus of Nazareth and the original Buddha, which and whose works demonstrate the value of caring and love and the timing and appropriate application of the use of force as a defender of such approaches, are actually compartmentalization responses to trauma. Sometimes they're good and sometimes not. Absent those particular existentialist-oriented thinkers who advocate caring for others with referenced necessary defenses (the Westbury Rebel) as a preponderant life modality, the subsequent definitions of how the human consciousness is designed and functions are skewed to accommodate the neurological molecular learning process ongoing following changes (rapid and radical in the instance of trauma) to identity. Thereafter, the philosophers, which have been providing our leadership for the past several thousand years, are trying to figure out what hit them. In some instances those thoughts produce some intellectual value; but some of the time it is psychopathology born out of trauma. No matter the social consequences of those constructs, the compartmentalization activity is allowing the trauma affected human brain to create abstractions, fantasies, hallucinations, philosophies or other intellectual views that serve to protect the organism while the cellular adaptations to the underlying molecular extinction run their courses. The Substrate and Molecular Purpose of Philosophy - In this instance using the Example of Manichaeism or the Duality of the Universe and so on Although inquiry into philosophy has not been my interest, I’ve had to enjoin that journey for the purpose of framing the Etiotropic perspective of brain integration of trauma and loss’s influences on thought. In that capacity, I’m often challenged by the those who would invoke the concept of Manichaeism into the discussion. That evocation invariably prevails for those students-psychotherapists, usually with religious backgrounds and trainings, who inquire into the molecular aspects of the meaning of brain integration as viewed in the context of human duality’s good and evil. That Etiotropic molecular answer to that set of interrogatories can be long and drawn out. It would take us away from the subject of this book. And, I would have to show the comparison contrast ETM thesis within a host of philosophies. So let me summarize this important one, only because the question plagues some students in such a manner that it demands at least a summary response from me. Duality or good and (or versus) evil are from this Etiotropic perspective functions of brain integration of trauma-loss and its relationship to the so called Elan Vital or life force. The latter is phylogenetic in theory and drives the organism toward, as the US Army would say to “Be the best that you can be!” That theme has always underlied the concept of competition; that is, excelling from all the genes handed down to an organism and combined with striving from what the figurative heart can produce. The life and movie of the racehorse named “Big Red” and “Secretariat” particularly as demonstrated in the last challenge in the Triple Crown’s Belmont Race, emphasize that theme as the meaning of the film and attendant story. The adage “Run your own race.” as used throughout the film meant just that: be what you are with the striving application of the best of what that is. In this ETM interpretation, all that is learned and compiled within the molecular long-term potentiation of the synapse as related to that striving to Be, is rendered into its molecular anti-thesis, long-term depression of the same synaptic traces, which is brought about by an inhibiter of the original reality bearing synapse. The inhibiting activity is the long-term potentiation of the new and always countervailing reality attending the event (trauma and loss). When a traumatic event is imposed upon that organism, or the experience is of loss as attends failure, and which can present into the milieu of experience of living things, the brain’s integrative activities consisting of the inhibiting of the original LTP manifest consciously and behaviorally in terms of thought as the ending of the organism as the molecular process proceeds. The integrative activity will send the brain into the compartmentalization activity, which of course is the use of the various cortex’s to explain away the ending ongoing, usually as current guesswork holds, in the mossy fibers of the Hippocampus. That process is facilitated, again, by the HAPA response which includes Noradrenergic and Opioid system bindings or no with other molecular neurotransmitter influences intended modulation of previously constructed synapses and the building with protein and other neural modulators of new synaptic substrates of reality. The opposites that prevail within those molecular changes are experienced consciously in thought along a continuum of very bad and bad, to nothing, to non plus or neutral, to not so good, good and very good, and even extraordinarily best. That continuum is interpreted in the cortex as an image of duality and consciously stored there as philosophy, at least until the brain integration (extinction of the original LTP representing the pre trauma thought and perceptual reality) molecular process underneath, most of which is done in the unconscious in the hippocampus, has completed. Due to the complexities inherent in brain redundant systems, the preponderance of the brain will participate in the integration. And I don’t know of the locations; nor will I pursue them as the functionings of the brain continue to be revealed in the literature. The brain during extinction of some of its elements always ask through the compartmentalization attributes what these ongoing molecular changes mean to the organism. The experience of duality underpinned by the actual molecular changes being undergone that act to work against the temporary and apparent demise of existence retards are gives the appearance of countervailing the so called, again by Burgeson, the Elan Vital. It will attempt to overcome the molecular changes in memory, and will if the extinction process is allowed to run its course. That can be facilitated by the intrapsychic, interactional and systemic participations of caring and the preclusion of the external variables referenced in this work as “exogenous” ones. When done, the need for the compartmentalization creation of Manichaeism in the abstract is over. The philosophy as a molecularly housed abstraction as maintained in memory will dissipate (also become extinct) as the original substrate’s (LTP) extinction is completed. Extinction of the original molecular learning (thought reality) as it had interacted with the phylogenetically-based in this usage again called Elan Vital or life force is manifested behaviorally or in psychological thought and experience as grief. The more pain and denial attending that manifestation, the greater the amount of integration-extinction ensconced in their compartments filled with abstractions (philosophies and theories) required molecularly in the substrate. It was not my purpose in the exposition of this theory to argue against a God or devil or just good and evil. Those possibilities fall into the category of the unknown, which is as I have studied them, the way that they are supposed to present. This subsection only provided my understandings of the molecular substrate of the concepts as professionals and other students inquire of them with and from me. Because I’m the one who thought this Etiotropic stuff up, it’s been my responsibility and obligation to answer the questions as they are asked and as I am capable. And of note, I’m not a student or investigator of the subject of spirituality or religions, other than as I’m required to show how they interface with the resolution-cure of psychological trauma and bring an end to certain kinds of criminal violence. The section does explain or suggest, depending on the number of times you’ve applied ETM TRT to a traumatized person, the molecular explanation of the difference between Cope and Cure of psychological trauma. CBT (or didactic education models wrestle around in the cortex with the conscious philosophy trying to make coping more facile with alternative perspectives and so forth while the hard work (extinction) is being done in the hippocampus; that is, where the core address for trauma has to be and without diversion into the recesses if one wants to cure or otherwise rid an individual of trauma-loss. Etiotropic Human Ontological Theory Purposes The Etiotropic perspective of the brain integrative process serves several purposes.
(For those of you who've made it this far in this add-on, please know that I will shortly update the information for currency purposes, as this component of the editorial is important stuff.) |
Because of the imbuing experiences accompanying the referenced neuroendocrine substrate and interactions with itself and other organisms (people), ontology of the human consciousness is routinely referenced or also metaphorically conceptualized as the human spirit when it is understood and properly exploited (meaning effectively addressed) by good souls. Hence the value of the existential aspects of valued religions and humanist recognitions of the wider and sometimes thought to be unidentifiable aspects of consciousness and their concepts of forces that are perceived in their existences to be greater than are we, as we are otherwise known solely as or by ourselves.
There's a political spin to these base-biological functional activities. Within those referenced molecular interplays ongoing within the substrate of the human consciousness and its collective manifestation in systems — again referring to centrifugally interacting effects upon individual relationships (two people), then spiraling even further out to families, neighborhoods, football teams, whole communities, organizations, regions, nations and entire civilizations — every human entity draws its sustenance from itself, its own identity, will and caring first, and then secondly as that compendium of cells integrate with others (referring to the various and often interlocking systems that support each other) through that equally phylogenetic capacity to care. Imposing, for example, behaviorally or attempting forcefully to define identity elements through implementation of the foregoing referenced hierarchially implemented management approaches of Leninism-Marxism, Fascism, other dictatorshipisms, and behaviorially sustained religions like Islamism — without consideration for the natural individual molding required to run its course existentially, to emphasize in this instance meaning biologically, will eventually result in the overthrow of the imposition so that the qualities inherent in the original ontological - biological essence of uniqueness will prevail in determining the actual identity biologically comprising that human individual and or collective entity.
Another way of saying the same thing behaviorally or again in political terms: consensually based social management models will alway overturn behavioral or top to down societal management approaches, but with one caveat. The overturn will occur if the biology is not killed off: the ashes retain no embers at all. Which is why controlled systems have to so rigorously maintain themselves with well constructed vigilance (use of force in defining how to Be) against free thought and open discussion. That's the behaviorist's implementation model requirements if it is going to continue to exist when otherwise having to operate contiguous to / with consensual or also termed open systems - societies - systems: democracies. Its all about human neurobiology and the way that it functions most naturally, purposefully, efficiently and congruently, and various thinkers' and groups' best efforts in figuring it all out and then bringing about the desired outcome: getting people to do what management wants them to do versus figuring out what people want the managers to do and then following the self-governs' directions.
Where many of this past two century's historians, philosophers, writers and seers have concluded that the forces driving civilization's conflicts are three — economics, race and the aquisition of power — I'ved opined in contrast (when addressing this issue publically in politcal discourse) that the matter is much simpler than that. The referenced imposition's subsequent conflict resulting from cultural or national managements' mistaken understandings of how the human ontological substrate is designed and functions, and then combined with its subsequent miss-uses or miss-applications are the root causes of most of those disruptions — some occuring to the point of catastrophe — repeatedly ongoing between the various both intra and international existential level disputes. The natural substrate underpinning ontological focus-first model (democracies) provides an individual and a culture or polity with the abilities to evaluate, to combine with others, to care at more profound levels, to know what is right for themselves, and to negotiate that belief in rightness with its external environment, much more effectively and efficently than can be surmised or otherwise induced by a few statist- and behavioral-based philosophers who from time to time try to figure out how to get the masses to do their bidding.
To throw a little necessary ad hominem into this discussion, in the end I've argued often and do again today that those managerial (behavioral-based) type thinkers are just trying to get others to be like them in order to shore up their own weakness in identity construction, and in so doing cater to those otherwise periodically floated-as-superior and usually restricted-to-cerebral-use (miss-guesses in how the human being's consciousness is supposed to function) only whims. Ensuring the opportunity of those natural variables to function individually and collectively properly (in accordance with the actual and full capacities of the substrate of how we think, feel and strive to be) is what Westbury High School, it's home state of Texas, and hosting country America are predominantly about.
They are the discoverers of this knowledge, the people who hammered out this true wealth of our society — the most accurate understanding of the complete construction of the human consciousness and how it best manages itself. And those societies and their people subsequently are the beneficiaries of their discovery, which is perpetuating itself throughout the world, perdurably protected by the Rebel in us all — the endogenous capacity to strive, to care, to struggle, to both endure and learn from loss, and through our resilience to even love. And as in some instances we are so gifted by providence to live in our time in this reality and as our stronger believers of faith argue is available in another and better life, again and again, and then again.
The subsequent congruity attending the American, Texan and Westbury human management model is although usually not always analyzed as I have endeavored to do so for my reasons over the years, is nonetheless felt very strongly by its citizenry; and it is this strength of experience that doesn't just bring and hold us together, at least during the really hard times — for example, when our innocent loved ones and neighbors are being murdered — but that also undergirds with additional strength those who've been born, raised and continue to live in non consensual-based controlled systems. Our work in and life of freedom calls to them, sometimes as from afar; no matter the distance, this phenomenon dramatically influences the likes of the Sharansky's, Ali's, Glazov's and Gabriel's — those four Rebels are now free persons who have become the truest of freedom fighters — and at the same time recognizing those who are still remaining in those darknesses to aspire to acquire the same experience of freedom to Be that we live, breathe and then with grace give back to the entire world every day.
Conclusion: The Importance of the Neuro-Endocrine Substrate of American, Texan, and Westbury Rebel Identity to Our Lives
Skippy; WHAT did you just say?! From the time recorded history began, philosophers, seers, cultural managers and other deep thinkers-leaders have attempted to produce abstractions that defined the basis of human thought and experience, and how it should be managed. Although we have not reached the end of that discussion, the last two decades has produced well documented neural and endocrinological descriptions as to how those two areas of study and subsequent operational implementation actually exist and function, letting us reach some pretty rational conclusions. Without ambiguity or equivocation, that body of information and other knowledge support the concepts and management thesis underpinning consensually based organized and administered societies — explicitly emphasizing the John and Abigail Adams and George Washington versions as opposed to current European social democracy adaptations — over those that have elected competing hierarchially conceived and orchestrated programs. Moreover, the substrate's analysis further supports both the value and necessity of strategically defending the environment of management of thought that enhances that neuro-endocrinological reality of consciousness. Those two ideas, existentialism and defense through fighting, are immutably mutually inclusive. They need and co-facilitate each other to do good for the individual as he and she integrate most effectively — albeit not always without painful learning experiences, naturally and as imbued spiritually by many-most, otherwise born out of conflicts emanating from functional differences and similarities ongoing between state and behavior — with the rest of the world. In the ideological wars regarding how we should all be and get along, the American, Texan and Westbury High School Rebels, following a couple of hundred years of struggling and sometimes painful definitional work, were correct; they were on the right side in the end.
Educating Ourselves? What's the Right or Best Way To Raise Ourselves Up, To Become More?
Addressing that question say people who don't fight over thought models as assiduously as do Christians, Jews, Hindus, Islamists, Buddhists, Zoastrians, Behaviorists and a couple of Animists, "What's the big deal over a little psychobabble?" While doing the intricate logic that formed America’s by-laws created during the American Revolution in 1777, again for reference to one of the great ontologically functioning geniuses of humankind, and the the principal architect first Vice President and second President of this country John Adams, wrote to Abigail his opinion of a formerly illiterate and aged person's endeavors to become educated. Abigail was helping the man to raise himself up, which was his desire to do later in his life. Adams, in his time in that congress and during his representations of the revolutionary government worldwide, had held positions of great power and authority, in the process communicating constantly with the finest minds this country and others in the world of that century had available to it. John and Abigail were, themselves, self taught students of the great classics, philosophers and religions of all time.
Mr. Adams, raised throughout his childhood as a farmer in the small community of Braintree, Massachusetts, and then becoming one of the earlier Harvard graduates and then a privately trained attorney, was rigorous in his constant admonitions to his children stressing academics in writing, philosophy, logic, science and art. Few people contributed as much to the formation of this country's system of balance between thought models that assured individual freedom would remain equally offset against the collective interests of the population as a whole in its needs to care for individual aspects developed under no government to speak, but simultaneously protect all from wrongdoings, which required some central social controls (employing the rule of law, that is, controls on behavior, but stipulated not to control thought or being). No one had provided more character dedicated to the discipline of objective rational thought no matter the selfish, highly emotional and deeply grieving elements that stressed the logic of the new order during the American Revolution. With that grand compendium of education and experience supporting his philosophy, here is what Mr. Adams said to his wife who was tutoring the man seeking self betterment through academia.
"But let him know that the moral sentiments of his heart are more important than the furniture of his head."
That is still the best way to better ourselves now almost two and one half centuries later.
Westbury Had its Own John Adams
When it comes to big and deep thinkers, and then even greater doers, we had somebody like that between the years 1961 and 1966. And he, plus what he learned in his earlier struggles, and what he decided was important to convey at the end of his life is why I delimited the years 1961 to 1965 (and actually all the way to 1966) as the specific Westbury classes that have saved western civilization, not necessarily the whole fifty years of that high school's life, although I'm sure they will do just as well as did we, if not better at their own calling. Here in what follows is how and what I learned about and from this person.
As I once wrote in the section dedicated to our high school principal, I was sitting in a biology class one morning when the teacher erupted into a discourse on the problems with Westbury's management and referred to the principal as "Wild and Wooly Billy Burns" or some name close to that. All of a sudden I found myself standing on my feet next to the wall clear across the classroom and asserting the intent to speak.
I told the teacher that I rejected her use of this classroom as a forum for attacking our school's leadership. It wasn't appropriate, it seemed and as argued by me, that she undermine its management authority and efforts, particularly by ridiculing this otherwise seemingly decent man. We were supposed to respect both him and her, he as our principal and she as our teacher. Also, I thought he cared about us and the whole place. But more than that, her speech would split us apart with no means of reconciling the criticism, which I believed should be made in other forums. Well, of course, I was ordered out of the room and went as directed. Seems I was always finding ways of getting out of classes.
With no place to go and sure that I was on my way to reform school, and I no doubt needed some reforming, I found a place to sit in the atrium-like space between the building's classrooms and the cafeteria. I don't think I was crying. But I do remember not knowing what to do. Then all horror broke loose from within my so-called in this paper "essence" as Mr. Burns, himself, came walking along the hall, visible through the glass panes of the divider wall. I almost took off running, but decided he might not see me if I remained hidden in the shade.
Too bad for me; he opened the door and headed across the court yard in my direction. I stood. And, he walked over and I think sat on a bench or something and invited me to sit next to him. After a few introductory words, I think they were about football, he said "Skip, I taught biology sometimes at Bellaire. If you like, I'll teach you during this hour until the semester is over." "SURE", and Thank you, Sir." I said, realizing it wasn't expel-city like I thought it was going to be when he'd come through the door.
So I spent the rest of that semester in Mr. Burn's office at a desk put there for me while he conducted the affairs of state. And that's how I would come to learn what he and we were doing there.
During and or following biology instruction and review of my homework, and while no one else was visiting him for business, we discussed at times the big picture of life. And what I remember in hindsight seeing was so very important, but not really understood by frontal lobe activity until I was probably his age. He was of the Great Generation. He had been part of the people who had denied the emergence of the forces of horror during his youth. Then as I later learned he had fought those forces as the American hero that he was. And now he was passing on what he and his generation had learned, to include some of the things I've shared in this essay with you. But mostly that he knew about the need to fight upcoming devastation through debate, argument, substance of being and character, and that this was the best way to keep large groups of people from destroying others from time to time.
He thought the place to become best prepared to do this was in our youth. And that was what he was doing — giving these new citizens the tools to figure things out, to search for, and then find and distinguish through comparison, facts and their meanings; to know how to care about our lives, our loved ones, our cultures, our societies, and most importantly our freedoms. He knew differences in philosophies and peoples would make those tasks difficult, and there would be complex problems to solve pretty much always. So he was dedicated to giving us the best we could obtain to address these matters he knew would come again.
He also loved the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights and the latter’s embodiment into our Constitution. When he posed for the Citadel photographer, he stood in front of the copy of the Declaration of Independence which hung on his wall.
Of course and most of the time, I was too stupid to know what he was talking about. But I listened because I appreciated his caring about me, instead of just kicking me out of school for being a troublemaker. He would help me again as it came my time to graduate and go out into the world. But that’s another story. And, he was truly a great biology teacher.
When I returned from Vietnam in September, 1966, Mr. Burns had just died in June. Mr. Brandstetter, who I also knew from my stint at Johnston Junior High — as he was its principal when I was there — replaced Mr. Burns. I don't know what happened to his dedications regarding us newbies and his passing on the neat stuff he did to me; but I'm pretty sure it didn't get carried forward by Mr. Brandstetter. Although a vigorous administrator, he was no Mr. Burns as that saying now goes. I did know Mr. Gupton, our assistant principal, really well. He, too, was a good person, although I never saw him as inspired as was Mr. Burns to pass on the referenced message. Moreover, and probably equally importantly to all this other discussion, Mr. Gupton gave good (meaning pretty fair) pops, five at a time on a weekly basis to me, and almost mechanically - never with malice. I remember the count: whack, 2, 3, 4, whack, 2, 3, 4, and whack, 2, 3, 4 . . . until it was over. But I don't remember his grasping the big issues of the world as did Mr. Burns, who never gave pops, at least to me. And I got them from pretty much everybody.
The world forming experiences endured by the Great Generation were passed on as equally "Great Ideas" by those people. Westbury High School would make them their own and that lesson learned would send us into the world with the understanding about being peaceful, but fighting when necessary as, Albert Camus called it in his 1951 essay, "The Rebel." That idea was instilled into people who would focus on when to stand up for themselves, how to contend with throwing off the always present and hierarchically arranged "Master - Slave" relationship seemingly forever haunting humankind's efforts to manage itself, and when and how to fight if necessary, and to do so without a desire to take over others' lives or to hurt them, when avoidable, during conflict.
Thanks to Mr. Burns and those teachers at Westbury between 1961 and 1965-66 for passing on those principles of existence, living and management to a group of young citizens who would very soon be required to use those gifts. We did, and still do. We had our own John Adams; he was Mr. W.L. Burns — leading the way — away down there in Dixie - Texas, that is! Thanks be also and apparently to providence for all of those fine people who endured the extraordinary travails of the mid twentieth century and then taught us what they had learned from the experience, and gave us the desire and their methods that might keep it from happening to the world again. Thanks be to the image of the Rebel, now instilled in us all, and for all time.
Westbury High School's Real Rebel of 1961-1965
Ironically Represents Abraham Lincoln's
"Mystic Cords of Memory"
Well, it's twenty-to-thirty or so years too late to return to the scene of the constitutional crime in 1990s Houston, Texas, and reinstate the old South's Rebel. We don't want to do that anyway, because that old Civil War soldier model of the Rebel would hurt some innocent young people who need to be protected from such things. And in this instance, protection is a good thing. But if we and they wanted to make this old claim right, that is protect all of our heritages with the best symbols for which the Westbury Rebel REALLY stood, this time we could make that mascot what it truly represented to us Texas — as different from the image handed down to us from the great states of Mississippi, Carolina, Georgia and Tennesse — Rebels. Staying with the overall conceptualization of a fighter in the defense of our attempts to define and honor human ontology and its dignity, we could build one basic mannequin. Instead of clothing it in a static symbolic costume, we could dress it for each competitive or other occasion in its various imprimatur reflective outfits. In one contest, the mascot could be presented as a member of the Continental Congress; in another, a rebel soldier of the American Revolutionary army; a Mexican priest or Indian fighting Spain; a Texican standing off the tyrant Emperor of Mexico; a Confederate soldier doing battle against the notably pain-in-the-ass know-it-all Yankees; a Negro 1st Sergeant of the Massachusetts great 54th Regiment; a female suffrage advocate fighting for the rights of women to be recognized as human beings who represented the fairer gender; and finally, an African American marching for the institutionalized right to be treated equally to everybody else. In listening to the private responses of the alumni, and as some of them have written in the reply sections to this commentary, our Rebel at Westbury High School created in the fall of 1961 represented the image of the need periodically to stand up, to fight when necessary, for the right to define, and how we go about managing, ourselves, and to do so by enduring against all and quite often overwhelming odds, all for the purpose of becoming and asserting without equivocation who we are and the best that is within us to be all that we would.
I doubt, however, that the votes would be there for that definition's implementation at this time. Political timing has always been my failed suit.
A Westbury High School Boy's Conclusion This has been the story of how Jesse W. Collins II (AKA Skip and Skippy), an unbroken paternally linked direct descendant of the Campbell Clan of Scotland - an ancestry which categorically dates to 1260 AD, The Marques Thomas Wharton of England, Thomas Wharton Collins of the Continental Army of the American Revolution, William Wharton Collins Atantic schooner captain and co-founder of Covington, Louisiana, George Thomas Wharton Collins — the first Sheriff of Angelina County, and son of Jesse W. Collins of Houston, Texas, and mother Lillie Harrison Collins, daughter of William Henry Harrison and Rosie Dye Harrison, and the granddaughter of a great Coushatta Indian woman — would get to Westbury High School, which opened just after the hurricane in 1961; and then come to tell this story about the Westbury Rebel, its epistemology and then demise in the 1990s on this 50th Westbury High School anniversary, 2011. After 750 years, and although there are thousands of other Campbells, Whartons and Collins to carry on their names, this direct posited two millenia in duration unbroken chain of fathers, grandfathers, sons and grandsons culminates with this Westbury High School boy, ending this particular and pretty long playing assortment of male chromasomes and genes. Skippy was here. Apparently, so were you. |
So does all this mean we, or at least that part of what was so fine about us, are already dead and gone?! Not at all. As long as that real estate and financial empire builder and magnate Linda Lambright, now Mrs. Hagerman, who was only a sophomore when in the stands as a cheering, shocked and then with other Rebels crying or nearly so at the Westbury vs. Austin, 1962, football game still lives, then she'll keep conducting — as she has for the last thirty years — the grandest reunion parties that celebrate the good soul and wondrous culture of our youth.
They still exists within the hearts and minds of us Westbury Rebels. It has to do with, although accepting our worth for what it is at any given time, simultaneously striving for the betterment of ourselves, becoming more through caring for others' interests and sometimes within the parameters of fair, ethical and honorable competition, a tool that when exploited with the application of care facilitates our achieving those periodically more extraordinary results. And all that phenomena can be summarized in the simple admonitions, as John and Abigail — speaking from the beginnings of the complexities attending the Enlightenment as represented in 18th century Massachusetts no less — left to us, to aspire "to be good and do good," sometimes applying ourselves assiduously to raising and advancing the solitary interests of our own families, at other times giving back to and for the well being of our society, and in some cases having to fight difficult battles with those who didn't share our views about the importance of individuality. But simultaneously never would we acquiesce to anyone's notion that we may, were, or still not be equal to the rest of the universe nor capable of having made and still making such cultural gifts of excellence and love no matter the obstacles that may have confronted us all at the time. With those mottos we and all of our descendents to include those from Westbury II will continue to define the extraordinary meaning and value of ourselves. And if somebody will keep paying indefinitely for the virtual publication of this archive after I've passed, then the idea underpinning the spirit of the classes of 1962 through 1965's commitment to doing the best that they could do as demonstrated in the Moonball inspired Westbury vs. San Jacinto, Lamar, Austin and Bellaire football games of 1962 can go on forever.
Epilogue
Thanks be to air conditioning, which deep understandings of its meaning to our civilization Rodney Pine in Houston, Texas recognizes and hence no doubt provided him with his raison d'etre for being in the business — as Rodney is one of the most caring and profoundly thinking human beings I've met or known, Charlie Daniels' prescience in "The South's Going to Do It Again" prevails now and likely will over the next centuries. Texas, which is one of the few places in America, or for that matter the entire civilized world, that still not just honors but defends the philosophy of individual freedom to be in its management / taxation system — redistribution of earnings from hard work, risk taking, and creative endeavor function philosophically anathematically to other worlds' notions of command contribution. Helping those less fortunate, which many of us have gotten to be from time to time, is done philanthropically when we are able to succeed, and through the following by most of religious or for some humanist principles imbuing them to help others even when we don't have much left to give, and all learned through the inculcated experience of personal hardship by those who've borne this community out of and under otherwise intolerable conditions and dramatic suffering affecting these staunch nation builders.
Recognizing the results of that spirit hallmarked in our valuing of individual ontology and what it can do for humankind, Texas holds the immigration record over all its counterparts in terms of both the actual numbers flooding into the state and rate of growth; those immigrants from New Hampshire, Detroit, Mexico, India, Argentina and far away places like Ghana or even New York City don't come here because of the guarantee of a life of ease, but for the opportunity to live it fully with all that they have and all that they can do. And through the same spirit of Westbury High School's students, even when we've moved on, we'll be there not just to celebrate that continuity but also incorporate into any changes those beliefs and ways of being that come from the best parts of our heritage — the blending through the gift of individual conscience of being comprised of dedicated work, diligence to discover and then striving do what's right, and Texas styled pioneering and southern hospitality, translated once to mean loving and caring for one's neighbors and community — and to lead the way for those who come to join us, to be with us in those after-memories of that good life.
Tribute to Howard Allen and the
Bellaire High School Cardinals
In the end when all the neurobiologies and their psychological manifestations of epistemology of Being have been explored and the various interpretative philosphies have been expressed, and then are done and gone, I guess we can and likely always will be beholding to Westbury High School's first head coach, Howard Allen — another man come to Texas from Tennessee, for initiating the Rebel theme. But not just to Mr. Allen, but as well to the Bellaire High School Cardinals for giving us something in which to convey ourselves out of and against. It was hard going at times trying to rise to the challenge of defining ourselves as to who we really were back then, not just acquiescing in that privilege's being given to our social competitors; they tried to instill into the broader community's consciousness the notion that Westbury High School between 1961 and the first and solitary four year graduating class of 1965 represented only Newbyism. In the fall of 1962, we overcame that collective effort by those undervaluing happy villains to relegate us to something lower than were they. But calling upon that source available to the core of individual personhood, we instead defined ourselves. Thank you very much not just to Bellaire, but to those other grand institutions of learning available to our culture, Lamar, San Jacinto and Stephen F. Austin High Schools of our Houston, Texas, district, for the opportunity. And being even more gifted than that, at least we weren't sent out into the world with no understanding of the profundity of the meaning of our lives, as were our extraordinarily talented and always deserving to be elevated in stature, but at the same time such unfortunate counterparts in that remarkable city of Bellaire, Texas. As our most encompassing brilliant and for me leading competitors, they have subsequently been represented so unjustly, that is, insignificantly given their true contribution to mankind and not to mention ingloriously infinitely for those poor students' souls, that is for the rest of their now in hindsight tragically obfuscated core existences, by an inconsequential red colored — albeit an appropriate and almost perfect symbol of political correctness — but always very pretty, bird.
Series Contents (continued)
- "Part II; (beginning) The Westbury Rebel's Meaning to Me," or "The First Play from Scrimmage in the Westbury vs Bellaire Fifty Year Rivalry"
- "Part II; (conclusion) What Happened at the End of the 1962 Westbury vs. Austin Football Game?"
- "Part III; The Good Rebel in Most of Us (beginning); For What Do Good Rebels Fight and Die?"
- "Part III; The Good Rebel in Most of Us (continued); Competitions, Challenges, and Making Things Right"
- "Part III; The Good Rebel in Most of Us (conclusion); Distinguishing Good from Bad Rebels"
- "Part IV: Rebel Management of Really Serious Troublemakers in (and from) the Global"