Humanity confronts this year a fork in the road; if we take the low road, this will precipitate and accelerate a regression into savagery, if we take the high road this species will create for itself a viable, peaceful, prosperous future, for the first time at last.

I use this metaphor to initiate an appeal to the new British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.

Hitherto I have tried to communicate the world view I have developed mostly to Americans, in the hope that they would begin the exceedingly difficult and arduous journey to freedom; these hopes have been dashed because no one in this nation has demonstrated the courage to confront the fundamental cause of the secular decline in education.

There is a ditty, a Scottish ditty, that I sung as a child in Jamaica that contains these words, “ You take the low road, and I will take the high road, and I will be in Scotland before you.”

The new Prime Minister of Great Britain almost immediately after occupying his office at Downing Street, confronts a very difficult and momentous choice; whether he will continue to provide unmitigated, unqualified support for the attack on Iraq, an invasion and occupation that has had such disastrous consequences, or, deviate from that course and inject a strain of rationality into this situation, this very potentially dangerous situation, by becoming a voice of peace.

In this war I have always, even before hostilities were initiated, traveled the high road.

Because I knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that the government of Saddam Hussein was not involved, or in any way responsible for, the 911 attack; that too many governments, including the government of the USA, were, or have been involved in the persecution of minorities for such crimes, no matter how heinous, to justify the initiation of hostilities.

Moreover, I perceived that this attack, despite easily predictable early successes, would eventually result in the current very precarious situation for the Allied Forces; that they would be trapped in the middle of a civil war, that this incursion would create a Crescent of Muslim Fundamentalism that would include the Shia faction in Iraq, those of that faction which controlled the government in Iran, Hamas in Palestine, and, Hezbollah in Lebanon, that the emergence of this new configuration of forces would destroy the balance of power in the Middle East and, in the long run, threaten the continued existence of the State of Israel.

Circumstances, specifically the foiled car bombings in London, and, the much ballyhooed attack on the Glasgow airport, seem to mandate and dictate that the new Prime Minister will take the low road and continue the policy of blind, unconditional support for President Bush that his predecessor initiated.

In Jamaica, there is a saying, “Cockroach has no business in a fowl fight;” an adage I am all too cognizant of, so how can I, a very exposed and vulnerable ordinary man with no qualifications, academic or otherwise, have the temerity to attempt to influence and alter the course of these momentous and earth shaking events and circumstances; and, the outcomes, the often replete with suffering and tragedy consequences, they precipitate for the wretched of this earth, for the hostages to an insensate and fickle destiny?

I dare because I must; because I perceive the connections between cause and effect, because I have developed the ability to process out of the deluge of information with which I am inundated from numerous sources the facts that would support function, because I know what I am doing.

Paradoxically and ironically, it was in Israel I developed this awesome and very burdensome facility; as I sunk deeper and deeper into the pit of depression caused by my initial separation from my beloved children, a temporary hiatus that I projected was foredoomed to become permanent because of my impending divorce.

My contribution to that very sad and ominous state of affairs had been the numerous affairs and infidelities I had engaged in which had been facilitated by numerous lies and deceits; which prompted the life changing decision to tell the truth for the rest of my life - whatever the consequences.

But I had no idea then of the sheer immensity, the vast, mind boggling magnitude of those consequences; that I would become capable of wisdom in the conduct of my affairs, that I would become capable of predicting the future, that one day far in the future I would feel obligated and duty bound to attempt to mobilize my race to avoid the ancient prophecy that they would be destroyed by fire.

It was during a sojourn in Boston, as I renewed and revived intimacy with an old sweetheart; that I was gifted with a text by her cousin who was studying medicine which contained a theory about human behavior which was to inform this transcendent enterprise.

The text, “Personality and Psychotherapy” by John Dollard and Neale Miller contained the following very inspirational and innovative hypothesis:

Human behavior is learned: precisely that behavior which is widely felt to characterize man as a rational being, or as a member of a particular nation or social class, is learned rather than innate.

The field of human learning covers phenomena which range all the way from the simple, almost reflex, learning of a child to avoid a hot radiator, to the complex processes of learning by which a scientist constructs a theory. Throughout the whole range, however, the same fundamental factors seem to be exceedingly important. These factors are: drive, cue, response and reinforcement. They are frequently referred to with other roughly equivalent words - drive as motivation, cue as stimulus, response as act or thought, and reinforcement as reward.

These principles combined with my firsthand experiences in Israel where I was exposed to the ideas that underpinned comprehensive, integrated developments programs; I had the opportunity to experience day to day existence on such projects while I sojourned briefly on a Moshav, on Kibbutz Hagoshrim, and toured Ashdod.

Implicit in those experiences was that the notion that these projects were rationally and meticulously planned to motivate Jews that were returning to Israel in large numbers from the Arab nations, often with just the clothes on their backs, to adopt a new design for existence; that embedded in those projects were the powerful rewards of adequate nutrition, improved living conditions, healthcare and access to education opportunities that would cause these refugees to embrace and adopt the prevailing culture.

An approach that caused the nation to integrate successfully, peacefully and without significant dislocation a veritable flood of refugees that doubled the population over a period that spanned two decades; a feat of social engineering unequaled and unsurpassed in human history, especially when it is taken into consideration that several major wars and intermittent skirmishing along every border were engaged in during that same period - conflicts from which the Israeli Army emerged victorious.

I became convinced that in the same way that factors of production migrated to enterprises in which they received the greatest rewards; that inculcating and conditioning any populace to embrace attitudes and patterns of behavior that would result in societal order, progress and efficient functioning was fundamentally and basically finding ways and means to reward the practice of these responses with a vastly superior quality of life - as the Israeli government had so creatively and innovatively succeeded in doing.

In 1976 when I returned to Jamaica, my conclusion that positive reinforcements was a far superior means of motivating action was reinforced by the overwhelming success of the only project that I had sole responsibility for; that was successful because an open ended system of reward was developed by members of the management team of the multinational company, Exxon.

The application of this incentive scheme resulted in an increase in productivity of some three hundred per cent; as stevedores engaged in loading the Motor Vessel “ Esso Caribe” with cargoes of lube oil in cans, pails and drums increased over a period of two years the loading rate from eight tons per hour to twenty four tons per hour; and, latterly to thirty two tons per hour; the same vessel was loaded by American stevedores in Baton Rouge Louisiana at a rate of thirty six tons per hour.

This achievement was made more significant because a conflict bordering of civil war was raging in the greater society during the period when this transformation occurred; a conflict in which stevedores participated when not at work, the group contained frontline warriors from the opposing factions who managed to cooperate on the job to attain this unprecedented increase in productivity.

If further evidence was needed to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, the advantages, benefits and superiority of positive reinforcements as motivation in the learning circle when compared with relying on coercion; I chanced upon this passage in an introductory text to the discipline of Sociology:

Modes of socialization Methods of teaching, training, and otherwise socializing the child differ along a number of dimensions. In practice, few parents are as consistent as the list implies. Nevertheless, research indicates that two broad patterns of socialization can be identified in American society. One pattern, oriented toward obedience, may be called “repressive socialization,” the other, oriented toward gaining the participation of the child, “participatory socialization.”

Reward and punishment play a part in all learning, but one rather than the other may be stressed. Repressive socialization emphasizes punishing wrong behavior, participatory socialization rewards and thus reinforces good behavior. In toilet training, for example, parents may be on the lookout for mishaps to admonish; or they may ignore mishaps and concentrate on praising instances of self-control and compliance.

If the modes of socialization are compared with laboratory conditioning of animals, repressive socialization is similar to administering an electric shock to an experimental rat when he takes a wrong turn in a maze. Participatory socialization is like giving the rat a pellet of food when he selects the right path. Both forms of conditioning extinguish “wrong” behavior, one by the negative act of punishment, the other by the positive act of reward. (Broom 100)

When I was totally incapable of convincing anyone in Jamaica or the USA of the benefits of substituting relying on coercion as the means used to motivate the other, and, switching to reliance on positive reinforcements, I realized that I was not done; and, I developed the following hypothesis to explain this phenomenon.

When homo sapiens evolved, and, the relevant and meaningful chapter of existence began; human beings for a minimum of half a million years, which period could have lasted for several million years, existed in small tribes that engaged in hunting and gathering; a way of life dominated by the roles of predator and prey, as they competed with other denizens for existing supplies of food.

This period ended when human beings became able to domesticate certain strains of grasses; and, launched the humble beginnings of agriculture, which had the effect of releasing the species from the constraints on its numbers imposed by the availability of food resources.

Human populations expanded exponentially and instead of a nomadic existence that was required by hunting and gathering, they were able to settle in one location and eventually created cities on the deltas of large rivers.

It is very significant to the logic of this hypothesis that a human child attains maturity and adulthood when he or she is twenty one years old, and goes on to live for a period twice as long; while the evolution of the species demonstrated very different spatial relationships; with the period spanning the immaturity of the species lasting a minimum of half a million years, and, the period which constitutes the mature component of the human story has lasted for ten thousand years, which could be further subdivided into a modern era that lasted for two thousand years.

So the relatively civilized, documented period of the human story is a drop in the bucket compared with the period when homo sapiens lived in the crucible created by extremes of physical dislocations and climate produced by the cooling of the planet; and, learned the thus far unbreakable habits that together constitute what I describe as coercion based culture.

In that first eight thousand years was developed Absolutism, the world view that reflected the cultural template developed in the ‘state of nature,’ one that produced governments in which an absolute ruler had the power of life and death over his subjects; a cultural tradition that endured unchanging for many millennia, one of which there continues to be many examples, whether in the form of despotic monarchies or dictatorships of the right or left.

The exception to this rule, the notable exception to this rule, developed in Greek city states; a military formation, the phalanx, which was crucial to the defense of these states precipitated a form of democracy; this flourished for a brief period but lost its potency and relevance as its success caused the Greek civilization to spread to cover great and far flung regions that contained culturally variegated populations whose governance required more autocratic and authoritarian forms.

This is also an accurate description of the evolution of the Roman Empire which supplanted the Greeks; and, adopted many of the democratic forms developed in the city states until military successes and the expansion this precipitated, created an Empire that spanned much of the known world and precipitated governments that were more and more absolute and autocratic.

It was as the two thousand years period of the modern era began that a peculiar dichotomy and ambivalence began to be a feature of human affairs; there began to be an ever increasing difference between concept and precept.

Humanity discovered and began to embrace ethics; the notions that justice, fair play and equality should inform, and be interjected into human relations to ameliorate the impact of the dominant social roles of territorial predator and prey to which human beings had been intensely conditioned and habituated during existence in the ‘state of nature.’

What is being suggested here is that this dichotomy was possible, and, was a reflection of the reality that the human psyche was divided into two compartments; the conscious and subconscious which permitted individuals to repress information that they could not confront into that unconscious compartment and avoid knowledge that would have had a negative effect on function.

The discovery of ethics occurred when Absolutism had gained a momentum, weight and had been vested with the authority of tradition in human affairs; when the physical environment was still in such a state of flux; and, the dominant position of humanity was so tenuous and fragile that it was inconceivable and well nigh impossible that ethics could have been practiced in precept.

An adjustment and adaptation to this reality took place; an adaptation which allowed the species to continue to efficiently and effectively compete and dominate, and engage in the primitive, brutal patterns of behavior which were required for this enterprise; while retaining ethics in concept, to be utilized as window dressing, these were paid lip service and obscured the unconscionable patterns of behavior that constituted coercion based culture; in actuality these were repressed so the agents of this culture did not ‘know’ what they were doing.

How else could human beings have engaged in, and, how could they continue to engage in, the horrifically cruel and brutal enterprises that taint and vilify our history; for example, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the extinction of native populations by Europeans when they discovered the New World, the unrelieved horror and brutality involved in the enslavement of millions of Africans and their transportation to the Americas and the Caribbean through the Middle Passage, the imprisonment and eradication of six million Jews and other ‘undesirables’ in concentration camps operated by agents of Nazi Germany, the racial cleansing that occurred in the Balkan States after the withdrawal of Soviet power, the eradication of human populations currently occurring in Africa?

How could millions of ordinary men and women be capable of, and engage in these perennial bouts of savagery and brutality; chapters in the human story so replete with tragedy, suffering and despair whether experienced as perpetuator or victim - unless they had the means to repress knowledge of these atrocities, and not be conscious of what they were doing?

Social developments did occur over the next two thousand years, especially in the last two hundred years but these changes had no effect on the basic cultural template; because these changes were accomplished by social groups accumulating power, not because of changes in perception or attitude.

For example, the changes that resulted in the Westminster model of government began with the circumstances and events described below:

Charles I, pushing his finances to bankruptcy and trying to force a new prayer book on Scotland, was badly beaten by the Scots, who demanded £850 per day from the English until the two sides reached agreement. Charles had no choice but to summon Parliament. The Long Parliament, taking an aggressive stance, steadfastly refused to authorize any funding until Charles was brought to heel. The Triennial Act of 1641 assured the summoning of Parliament at least every three years, a formidable challenge to royal prerogative. The Tudor institutions of fiscal feudalism (manipulating antiquated feudal fealty laws to extract money), the Court of the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission were declared illegal by Act of Parliament later in 1641. A new era of leadership from the House of Commons (backed by middle class merchants, tradesmen and Puritans) had commenced. Parliament resented the insincerity with which Charles settled with both them and the Scots, and despised his links with Catholicism. 1642 was a banner year for Parliament. They stripped Charles of the last vestiges of prerogative by abolishing episcopacy, placed the army and navy directly under parliamentary supervision and declared this bill become law even if the king refused his signature. Charles entered the House of Commons (the first king to do so), intent on arresting John Pym, the leader of Parliament and four others, but the five conspirators had already fled, making the king appear inept. Charles traveled north to recruit an army and raised his standard against the forces of Parliaments (Roundheads) at Nottingham on August 22, 1642. England was again embroiled in civil war. Cromwell added sixty horses to the Roundhead cause when war broke out. In the 1642 Battle at Edge Hill, the Roundheads were defeated by the superior Royalist (Cavalier) cavalry, prompting Cromwell to build a trained cavalry. Cromwell proved most capable as a military leader. By the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644, Cromwell's New Model Army had routed Cavalier forces and Cromwell earned the nickname "Ironsides" in the process. Fighting lasted until July 1645 at the final Cavalier defeat at Naseby. Within a year, Charles surrendered to the Scots, who turned him over to Parliament. By 1646, England was ruled solely by Parliament, although the king was not executed until 1649. English society splintered into many factions: Levellers (intent on eradicating economic castes), Puritans, Episcopalians, remnants of the Cavaliers and other religious and political radicals argued over the fate of the realm. The sole source of authority rest with the army, who moved quickly to end the debates. In November 1648, the Long Parliament was reduced to a "Rump" Parliament by the forced removal of 110 members of Parliament by Cromwell's army, with another 160 members refusing to take their seats in opposition to the action. The remainder, barely enough for a quorum, embarked on an expedition of constitutional change. The Rump dismantled the machinery of government, most of that, remained loyal to the king, abolishing not only the monarchy, but also the Privy Council, Courts of Exchequer and Admiralty and even the House of Lords. England was ruled by an executive Council of State and the Rump Parliament, with various subcommittees dealing with day-to-day affairs. Of great importance was the administration in the shires and parishes: the machinery administering such governments was left intact; ingrained habits of ruling and obeying harkened back to monarchy. With the death of the ancient constitution and Parliament in control, attention was turned to crushing rebellions in the realm, as well as in Ireland and Scotland. Cromwell forced submission from the nobility, muzzled the press and defeated Leveller rebels in Burford. Annihilating the more radical elements of revolution resulted in political conservatism , which eventually led to the restoration of the monarchy. Cromwell's army slaughtered over forty percent of the indigenous Irishmen, who clung unyieldingly to Catholicism and loyalist sentiments; the remaining Irishmen were forcibly transported to County Connaught with the Act of Settlement in 1653. Scottish Presbyterians fought for a Stuart restoration, in the person of Charles II, but were handily defeated, ending the last remnants of civil war. The army then turned its attention to internal matters. The Rump devolved into a petty, self-perpetuating and unbending oligarchy, which lost credibility in the eyes of the army. Cromwell ended the Rump Parliament with great indignity on April 21, 1653, ordering the house cleared at the point of a sword. The army called for a new Parliament of Puritan saints, who proved as inept as the Rump. By 1655, Cromwell dissolved his new Parliament, choosing to rule alone (much like Charles I had done in 1629). The cost of keeping a standard army of 35,000 proved financially incompatible with Cromwell's monetarily strapped government. Two wars with the Dutch concerning trade abroad added to Cromwell's financial burdens. The military's solution was to form yet another version of Parliament. A House of Peers was created, packed with Cromwell's supporters and with true veto power, but the Commons proved most antagonistic towards Cromwell. The monarchy was restored in all but name; Cromwell went from the title of Lord General of the Army to that of Lord Protector of the Realm (the title of king was suggested, but wisely rejected by Cromwell when a furor arose in the military ranks). The Lord Protector died on September 3, 1658, naming his son Richard as successor. With Cromwell's death, the Commonwealth floundered and the monarchy was restored only two years later. The failure of Cromwell and the Commonwealth was founded upon Cromwell being caught between opposing forces. His attempts to placate the army, the nobility, Puritans and Parliament resulted in the alienation of each group. Leaving the political machinery of the parishes and shires untouched under the new constitution was the height of inconsistency; Cromwell, the army and Parliament were unable to make a clear separation from the ancient constitution and traditional customs of loyalty and obedience to monarchy. Lacey Baldwin Smith cast an astute judgment concerning the aims of the Commonwealth: "When Commons was purged out of existence by a military force of its own creation, the country learned a profound, if bitter, Lesson: Parliament could no more exist without the crown than the crown without Parliament. The ancient constitution had never been King and Parliament but King in Parliament; when one element of that mystical union was destroyed, the other ultimately perished."

It is these, conflicted, brutal and traditional circumstances that produced the wider distribution of power that hitherto had been concentrated in the hands of an absolute ruler.

When, after the Industrial Revolution, the working class gained the power to restrain production and trade; they too used the strike weapon to carve their niche in the new political system.

Later, women organized to gain the right to vote, a right not easily conceded as these suffragettes had to overcome rapes, physical assaults and other indignities to achieve their objectives.

In his watershed work, “The Challenge of World Poverty,” Gunnar Myrdal states:

It has never occurred in recorded history that a privileged group, on its own initiative and simply in order to give reality to its ideals, has climbed down from its privileges and opened its monopolies to the unprivileged. The unprivileged have to become conscious of their demands for greater equality and fight for their realization. At that point, the general acceptance of ideals can become operative and important. And this is the reason why in my opinion it is not insignificant that the egalitarian ideals are commonly accepted on the level of principles in the ruling class. (Myrdal 76)

When combined with the fact that revolutions worldwide resulted in a sterile exchange of elites, it became clear to me that force could never produce change in a culture whose nature had, at the outset, been determined by reliance on force to motivate action; whose ethos was competition, whose dominant roles were territorial predator and prey, a cultural template which was unashamedly elitist, that created and perpetuated a situation in which power, economic, social or political power was concentrated in the hands of the few; and, the corollary of this condition that this resilient and enduring cultural template must produce more and more poverty, that this social disease must be a recurring, perennial feature and characteristic of coercion based culture, this must the detritus of competition unrestrained by morality.

Which prompted me to reject force of any kind in the transcendent enterprise of changing this archetype so redolent with tragedy and despair; one in which it was clear was based on immorality which produced exploitation and increasing inequality; and, that since knowledge of such behavior was consigned to the unconscious this resulted in the past being repeated ad nauseam, over, and over, and over, again.

After practicing the discipline of truth for an extended period I began to retrieve more and more of my memories; I began to see clearly the impact of guilt on function and the role of rituals in overcoming this effect.

To site an apt and relevant example, an experience shared by many human beings; in the period before my marriage my sexual relations were tainted by dysfunction, by premature ejaculation, to be more specific.

On my honeymoon, I discovered without having any idea of what produced this boon; that I had developed an unprecedented stamina and control; and, that the impotence that had combined with premature ejaculation to make my sexual relations unsatisfactory and unfulfilling had completely disappeared.

In retrospect, with an intellect no longer lamed by repression, I was able to analyze and understand the recurrence of this critical to my happiness, inadequacy and incapacity; to comprehend that it was a symptom produced by the new, ever increasing burden of guilt I had incurred by being unfaithful to my wife.

It was the analysis of this experience which permitted me to develop a realistic picture of the human condition; and, perceive the areas of blindness and the dysfunction this produced in human beings, and fully appreciate the impact of institutions, for example, the theater, that provided catharsis and created the capacity to function.

This was always a work in progress, an enterprise in which my progress, my problem solving capacity depended on my practice of the discipline of truth; one that was directly related to how much I told the truth, one in which it was always easy to backslide, to fall prey to, and, once again exhibit the deeply ingrained attitudes and patterns of behavior of coercion based culture.

From the outset, I intuitively decided that I needed to appeal to the intellects of human beings; and, that it would be useless and counter productive to attempt to impose on anyone this emerging innovative design for human existence; as this paradigm became clearer and clearer I became more and more convinced that I was on the right track, that my decision to concentrate on enlisting the cooperation of other human beings was the only means of achieving my goal, despite the fact that it was not working.

To exemplify this situation, to convince that I have been engaging in an exercise in futility and that I can only be successful in communicating this message to individuals who have more than a passing acquaintance with the truth I insert my latest plea in its entirety.

How low can you go?

One of perennial tourist attractions, a component of every stage show put on for visitors to my island in the sun; is, performers doing the limbo.

Perhaps because it is so simple and so popular; a bar is placed to span the space between two supports, very much like the apparatus for the high jump; but, instead of testing how high you can jump this tests how low you can go.

Sometimes, the bar is set on fire; and, somehow, incredibly performers approach the burning bar and pass under it when it is no more than six inches or less from the floor.

As I write, I am conducting such a test for every American I can communicate with; I am setting out to discover, how low can they go?

Not to worry, very like the last time I conducted this test; years ago in the period after 1996, only I will know the result of this test.

The test is to find out how many individuals can admit to the importance, the critical importance of motivation in human learning?

In their watershed work, “Personality and Psychotherapy,” Professors John Dollard and Neale E. Miller suggest that:

Human behavior is learned; precisely that behavior which is widely felt to characterize man as a rational being, or as a member of a particular nation or social class, is learned rather than innate.

The field of human learning covers phenomena which range all the way from the simple, almost reflex, learning of a child to avoid a hot radiator, to the complex processes of insight by which a scientist constructs a theory. Throughout the whole range, however, the same fundamental factors seem to be exceedingly important. These factors are: drive, cue, response and reinforcement. They are frequently referred to with other roughly equivalent words -- drive as motivation, cue as stimulus, response as act or thought, and reinforcement as reward. (Dollard 25)

For a long time, a very long time, I have been trying to communicate to Americans that human beings were driven up the steep incline towards civilization and that every social problem; those that now seem impossible to solve, that have assumed such monstrous, monolithic proportions have done so because the adoption and implementation of democratic ideals and principles have caused the people of this nation to reduce, in law and custom, the degree and extent to which coercion, in any form, overt or covert, can be applied to citizens - without creating an alternative means of motivating attitudes and patterns of behavior necessary for societal order, functioning and progress.

Education, is a case in point; and, forms the acid test of the moral character of individuals who claim to be patriotic Americans.

I have circulated, or, will circulate by electronic mail an essay on freedom entitled “The Enemy Within;” to every major media house, print or electronic, to every Presidential candidate, to every member of both Houses of Congress; that contains the following analysis of the fundamental problem in education:

This is implicit in the situation I encountered when I went back to school to attempt to get an accounting degree at the Central Campus of the Broward Community College.

In a marketing course I witnessed an instructor, Professor Sheets, provide the answers to a multiple choice quiz, on the eve of an examination; and, students still failed to get high marks, immediately I realized that something was very wrong.

When I participated in a required course in Public Speaking and confronted the reality that half of the other participants in the class could not read; I began to discern the true dimensions of the problem in education; that students at lower levels of the system were not learning the basics, to read and do simple sums; but, were being passed upward through the system by means close akin to cheating like the ploy initiated and orchestrated by Professor Sheets.

I got the last piece of puzzle when an African American teacher, with twenty years experience in teaching in Public Schools, confided in me that the problem had its genesis in that period when the schools were first integrated; white parents who could not bear the thought of black teachers having the authority to apply physical sanctions to their children, demonstrated to have corporal punishment removed from schools, and, the descent, the three decade slide into disorder and chaos, began to be experienced.

This is the simple test; will any of the aforementioned individuals who read this be galvanized to confirm or deny the significance, the impact of motivation, or the lack thereof, on the secular decline in education?

Can any American, regardless of ethnic background, become aware and admit to the fact that this could have occurred?

I suggest that this is the fundamental underlying cause of the failure, the contemporary abject failure, of social institutions in most of the nations that are engaged in the experiment in democracy.

That coercion worked so well for so many millennia that the application of any other means became superfluous and redundant; and, atrophied.

That the application of coercion was so agonizing and odious; both for those who applied it, and, those victimized by it - that this was consigned to subconscious and became a blind area in the human psyche.

But to redeem the education process, to restore function in democratic societies that now exist in the limbo precipitated by low levels of motivation; this situation must be confronted, this demon must be exorcised.

It is embarrassing, totally embarrassing for any American, white, black, or whatever, to admit that racism is the petard on which this nation’s function is being hoist; but for the common good this must occur.

It is as embarrassing for me to admit that in designing this ploy; I find that the original version of the essay was rife with grammatical mistakes that had the effect of making the concepts obscure, creating confusion and obfuscating when clarity was so critically important.

Yet I soldier on because I must, because we all must to preserve this nation; that is built on ideals and principles which must survive - if civility and rationality is to survive.

I failed on the last occasion that I attempted to communicate this message; so again I have the very burdensome task of canvassing Americans as to how low can they go? As to what is more important; to collectively avoid exposure, censure and embarrassment, or, the capacity to socialize the young of this nation?

I ask you to remember those halcyon days when you went to school; when you confronted as I did, a teacher like my early mentor, Ms. Brown, who wielded a ruler as the symbol of her absolute power and authority.

With that ruler she created the order and discipline necessary for the imparting of knowledge; any student who was noisy or disruptive of her class, was constrained, while bearing the concentrated attention of the entire group, to present their open palms to be struck by that instrument of torture; and, to bear the pain and humiliation - which was exponentially increased, if, heaven forbid, the wrongdoer was reduced to tears or to vocal expressions of suffering.

If you did not share that experience, you have suffered for it all of your life; because you avoided it you have failed to be socialized; not only have you failed to learn certain basic skills that open up the vast universe of knowledge; but, you have probably failed to learn manners and civility, respect for constituted authority, respect for other human beings and for the property rights of other human beings; components of social learning the absence of which will make you prone to engaging in criminal, antisocial behavior; and, result in your being quarantined and isolated for the common good from extensive and meaningful contact with other human beings.

The basic principle that guides my existence is that I will not coerce another human being, or, be coerced by another human being; yet, what I am promoting here is that corporal punishment be reintroduced in Public Schools, for the common good.

This may, on the surface, appear to be a contradiction in terms; it is not, because function, the overriding imperative, demands that there be sufficient motivation if learning is to occur; and, for the general run of children in existing, contemporary social systems in which traditions of coercion based culture are still very pervasive and deeply embedded, the carrot is too esoteric and meaningless to currently replace the stick.

When this missive was comprehensively ignored - to the best of my knowledge, when it failed to evoke a single response, I became desperate, even more desperate than I was before.

I do not believe any group of words can communicate the level of frustration inherent in attempting to communicate the value of telling the truth and relying on positive reinforcements to a population so repressed and confused that they provided a plurality for the current President not once, but on two occasions; to a population a majority of whom cannot dredge up the moral courage and will necessary to educate their young but who unceasingly, hypocritically and fraudulently claim to exist in the ‘home of the brave.’

In this social milieu I am only able to maintain an increasingly tenuous grip on my sanity because I am able to process out of the chaff of misinformation the facts that would support function and so can, with some accuracy, predict the course of events; a intellectual facility that convinces me that I continue to be sane and rational.

Also, because the observations and insights of a man whom I believe was the first human being to assiduously practice the discipline of truth and so attained wisdom in the conduct of human affairs and civility, has left me signposts which have guided me along the high road which I am attempting to travel.

In extremity he exclaimed, “Father, forgive them they know not what they do.”

He spoke of “the beam in our eyes” which I interpret to mean that every last one of us is an agent of coercion based culture; that we all learned to be diplomatic, to never describe the reality that the new neighbor is disgustingly fat or ugly, a mechanism which we quickly learned could be utilized to hide, even from ourselves, our own faults and inadequacies.

Because when men felt undressed if they appeared in public without a weapon, he taught us not to ‘throw pearls before swine,’ a parable that could not fail to be intensely meaningful and very positively impact the sensibilities of an individual who has engaged in the exercise in futility of trying to communicate a new design for existence to a people whose government has for five decades engaged in a spending binge; and, which government have now to show for it, a steadily rising tide of poverty, crime and drug abuse, a bankrupt Social Security Fund, and, a national debt that will negatively affect the quality of life of countless future generations of Americans; yet these people are so steeped in the delusion that they are the richest nation in the world that they are impervious to, and, stoutly resist considering, in precept, any deviation from that course.

In 1996, I constructed a web site, which sadly is now defunct because of financial constraints; a web site which had the theme “The Lovetrain” based on the message in the music of an oldie by the O’Jays with the same name, the lyrics invited people all over the world to board the lovetrain.

I settled on that theme for that web site because I believed the first step on the Freedom Road must be that the individual care for someone or something more than himself or herself; I began my journey of discovery because I loved my children more than I loved myself which caused me to overcome my selfishness and eventually caused me to decide that I would substitute positive reinforcements and forever forego utilizing coercion in my relations with other human beings.

I believe that the fundamental characteristic of predators is that they are wholly self centered and self absorbed; completely dedicated to satisfying their appetites whatever the cost or implications for others.

As I recently sorted through my electronic mail for responses to my latest plea; I discovered an item of mail from Jim Wallis of the Sojourners Movement
that contained the following passage:

I want to introduce you to someone. His name is Gordon Brown, and he just became Britain's new Prime Minister. You have probably been hearing and reading the news about the transition from Tony Blair to Brown.

And,
On children in poverty:
... let me say also that in the fourth richest country in the world it is simply wrong – wrong that any child should grow up in poverty. To address this poverty of income and to address also the poverty of aspirations by better parenting, better schools, and more one-to-one support, I want to bring together all the forces of compassion – charities, voluntary sector, local councils, so that at the heart of building a better Britain is the cause of ending child poverty.

After reading this missive in its entirety I was moved to take you at your word; and, extend an invitation that you be the first passenger to board the ideational vehicle that is implied in the foregoing, I am asking you to become a voice of peace.

When I began this leg of my journey of discovery in 1996, there was time, not much but enough for the love train to reach destinations worldwide; now, we are all out of time, the hour of decision is upon us, every human being must decide whether to take the high road to peace, or, the low road that repeats the past over, and over, and over, again.


William E. Virtue

Ph: (901) 201-8090

3222 Airways Blvd # 312
Memphis, TN 38116