Natural Law and Deductive Reasoning for Millennials and Gen Z on Twitter

A couple of weeks ago I was tossed from Twitter; “Suspended” they said:

       After careful review, we determined your account broke the Twitter Rules. Your account is permanently in read-only mode, which means you can’t Tweet, Retweet, or Like content. You won’t be able to create new accounts. If you think we got this wrong, you can submit an appeal. (link provided).

Actually, this is no big deal, since my participation at Twitter has been to enjoy the give-and-take of people of my own generation (Baby Boom) and to study thinking processes and learning histories of the most recent generations, 1981 to 2012, Millennials and GenZ, and how they are being manipulated to think, which to me is a very, very big deal.

What is a big deal with this suspension is that Twitter has continued to take my $8 a month, leaving it to this nearly 80-year old mind to figure it out myself how to cancel my subscription, having gone nearly 65 years of my life without knowing a thing about letting my fingers do the walking anywhere.

My first experience with mass communications was when I was 6. My mother had me stand on a stool, pick up a little earpiece hanging on the left side of the wooden box, and to turn the crank on the right side, two-or-three times until a voice came into my earpiece “Operator?” and I was to say “Miss Martha, let me have Number One-Seven, Please.”

One-Seven (17) was the butcher’s shop in the little coal town where I was born, raised, and lived until I was 18. And Miss Martha worked that operator’s shift for about 3-4 years until we got regular black desk phones, complete with dial tones connecting us to a larger regional telephone network. In a town of just over a thousand, I never knew what Miss Martha looked like or where she hung her coat. And I never finger-dialed a phone until I was about 11. “17” was the only number I ever called on that crank-telephone.

Nor was I the least bit interested in learning all the possibilities of that magic box, although my older sister had taken to it like a duck to water, especially after a desk model had come into our house when I was about 11, about the same time Elvis first appeared on TV.

Now, I don’t know if making this connection is learned at the knee of an elder, like a father or an uncle, or favorite teacher instructing you, or whether it just washes over a person, “Shazzam!”, like a sudden rain storm , bur the first inclination is always to find dry shelter. But once having gotten wet, if planning to go outside the first inclination is first look at the skies and decide whether a hat and umbrella might be useful to carry, just in case.

It’s how we learn common sense. “Doesn’t have the sense to get in out of the rain” was probably the awfullest thing my mother said about certain kinds of people, almost all young men.

So there’s that last level of learning. Most of the things we learn is by looking over our shoulders, even if we’d been forewarned. I’d been taught rules in several venues, from Mom to Sunday School to the Preacher that it’s not just wrong, even a sin, to tell a lie. But I never really learned that lesson until I walked right up into the “Pain clause”, never mentioned by either, when a kid four years older than me broke my nose because I lied to him. I was 12 at the time. In all my previous warnings no one ever mentioned a “pain element”. And this element’s name was Mick Hensley, and is why I still remember Mick in my prayers (and never allowed a photograph to be made of me from the side).

Warnings, even wishes, in the Pain Clause probably was why I was banned from Twitter, although no one ever cited for me specific examples, the sorts lawyers have to present to judges to get a conviction. I was free and easy with wishes for bloody noses there, and even the occasional leg-limp, to deter the antics of Antifa, whose members fall into this generational bracket. But I was never blocked or reprimanded.

Bottom line, Nature carries its own saddlebag of teachable life-lessons to be passed out and its justification it just simple human survival…only the teachings of those lessons, or even their warnings, are considered out of bounds by far too many parents these days, not to mention schools, even city, county, state and federal legislatures. And in certain unspecified circumstances, on Twitter.

“If I dood it I get a ‘panking” used to be a universal law for centuries, but today, even storekeeps can’t protect their own inventories if it means laying a hand on a thief. What I did at Twitter was recommend a bloody nose and a mouth washed out with soap…most of the times to be administered to a lot of people, albeit people I wouldn’t recognize in a police line-up. I didn’t follow them, they didn’t follow me.

But thanks to Mick Hensley I started paying attention early in life, years before I started getting involved as a defense lawyer in the Army. For 5 years. It was there I started noting backgrounds, upbringing; where my clients came from, a little family history, education background.

That’s why this site is largely dedicated to how common sense defines how things work, and how Nature designs things to work.

I followed my Army years with a few years of private law practice in Arizona, in part because my dad had retired to a small mining town, due to a heart condition, that would ultimately lead to surgery. Much like the Army years, I defended Mexicans, Apaches and even good ol’ boys in pick-ups who’d had just a few too many at the pool hall. They all had their stories and I was fortunate enough to use my Army days to know to ask.

I switched gears from law to the corporate world of manufacturing for a decade, the Reagan years, with several thousand production employees in three major locations. Like my army years, I was more comfortable on the factory floor than the office, exchanging chats with production workers and floor supervisors. The same rules applied; where a person came from, what Generation, and what economic and social class they came from. Family size also mattered, as does religion, the presence or absence of it not only at home, but buried in the educational system that teaches them, at least about the seven deadly sins and virtues, is also a key marker.

I would then carry my accumulated my notepad to the second and Third World, beginning with Ukraine and Russia, 1991-92, with intermittent college teaching appointments (Civics, Business Law) of mothers trying to get associate degrees in order to get off AFDC (thanks to Newt Gingrich and his GOP Congress under Bill Clinton). The reception I got from those moms for three  years formulated the basis for my “American Exceptionalism” thesis found here  in several locations, until I packed up to move to Virginia, for better access to Central Europe and the Balkans, 1995-2008.

Laws of Generations Apply

The best examples of the “foundational” generation is found in my Dad and my first wife’s dad, both members of the Greatest Generation, (those born 1901-1927), so named I guess because they fought the world’s greatest war, World War II.

Neither ever bragged about it. It was actually having “known war” that separated membership in the VFW and the American Legion. One’s membership was more selective than the other. And memories  were darker. Dad never sat me down on his knee and told me a single thing about his three years in Africa and Europe. All those dark things I learned from Granddad. Later I read most of Bill Mauldin’s cartoon books, and Ernie Pyle’s stories, especially the Death of Captain Waskow, in Italy in 1944. (I published it here in 2011.) Not a knee-slapping story in the bunch.

My Dad only made it thru a semester in college, but always had a native interest in “how things work in Nature”, only more as a hobby to be enjoyed while sitting on a river bank fishing (without any bait, I came to find out, just for peace and quiet. You had to know Mom to understand.). I don’t know how he came to know the war was coming, but like millions he just woke up on December 7, 1941 Sunday to find the country at war. He was a freshman in college at the time, with a new wife. But America-at-large knew a war was coming. Kate Smith told us in 1939.

Eleven months later, my Dad hit the beach in North Africa (Nov 8, 1942), with a one-month old baby daughter in tow to Mom, who’d moved to Ohio to wait the war out with her sister and her husband, who was 4-F, and ran a department store. (He never saw my sister until he came home.)

His unit moved into Sicily and Italy, in ’43-’44, but I can’t be sure when he left Italy, just that his invasion mission finally ended in late 1944. The war against Germany was going smooth, so the Army felt secure in their southern flank and sent boatloads of tired soliders home. So, he was reunited with Mom and Sis sometime in March ’45. I know, because, Dad like to brag, when he’d had a couple, that I was born 9 months to the day (December 5), that he’d walked in the front door.

As a generational side bar, my first wife’s father was still in Germany when my Dad came home. A Tennessee farm boy, he had enlisted after graduation from a Kentucky college on a football scholarship, and ended up a division clerk with the 3rd Armored Division when they entered the Dora-Mittlebau concentration camp in Germany in April, 1945.

Dark memories all around.

On returning home, my Dad’s coal company sent him to Chicago to take a speed course in mine engineering, so he could return to work as an apprentice to the Chief Engineer. It took several years before being certified, then he could move onto Chief Engineer while I was in university, then General Superintendent while in law school.

Similarly, my wife’s father took his GI Bill and attended grad school in Denver to obtain his MBA, then accepted a position as officer manager for the world’s largest “vertical knitting, bleaching and cut-and-sew facility” in the world. By 1979 he had risen to #3 in the company, which was eventually sold to a “Gordon Gekko” robber-baron in the early 1990s.

So, don’t go comparing the GI Bill of the 1940s and 50’s with this monstrosity called the Federal College Loan programs created by Barack Obama. Totally different purposes. I cannot begin to tell you the economic differences the GI Bill made to the American economy and culture, when compared to the deep, deep searing wound that the Federal-Obama loan programs have placed not only on the economy, but the very symbols of political fairness in modern America.

America, no, the whole world could never repay those men who laid their lives on the line those four years, 1942-45, and in case you find this startling, I’ll offer up a little film of a recent musical presentation presented annually in The Netherlands to commemorate the Allied soldiers who died defeating the Germans 17-27 September, 1944, (https://www.vassarbushmills.com/2023/05/13/74263/) This piece also lists the burial places of 104,366 American buried in northern Europe, excluding, Italy, North Africa and all of the Pacific…

…and serves as the basis for my first Civics lesson at that business college in Cincinnati in the 90s. I drew a line across the board, and on the left, marked ancient Egypt, and on the right, the current date. Then I asked the room full of young black mothers (with children in the nursery across the hall), “When was the first time a nation ever sent its soldiers to fight to free a people they had never ever seen or spoken to?” No one raised a hand. No one had a clue. So I went to the 5000 year line on the board, then walked the chalk way to the right, marked a line, and it printed “1860”, saying this was when several million mostly farms boys north of the Ohio River, enlisted to fight and die to rescue a people they’d never ever seen, not even in a magazine.

This was my introductory lecture at every class.

Food for thought.

So I do believe World War II was America’s last war in which the average soldier knew as much about what was going on as did their leaders, and a kind of handshake between social classes went forward to create the greatest advancement in America’s ability to defeat the greatest threat to human freedom…until now.

My mother also fore-warned about sin me until she was blue in the face. A heavy-duty Appalachian Pentecostal who lived to be 95, she once asked me if I actually believed that her finger-wagging about the “valley of the shadow of death” would keep me from going into that valley anyway? She just said, “I knew you’d take your chances. You were so much smarter than me. But I knew if you went in and survived (drugs, alcohol, divorce, and every sort of temptation) I knew you’d come out the other side with all sorts of knowledge you weren’t actually looking for, but would learn from them having been thrust upon you by your own choices and vanities.” (Remember that word, “vanities”.)

“Since you survived that, I know you’ve learned all sorts of ways to put two-and-two together and still come up with four.”

Mom was right. Lesson learned, and reproved 100’s of times in my life. Some of those things showed up in essays I did at my “VassarBushmills” site, and were incorporated in the insights of blind author, David Poff’s 2021 production of Unwashed Philosophy: A User’s Guide for Our Imperfect Union (still available at Amazon.com ). I referred to them as “the thin red line”.

My bottom line since 1992: “With the poor people of this earth I have cast my fate” (from “Guantanamera”) and that has directed my critical thinking since.

So whoever those people over at Twitter who algorithmically don’t like me, please make your case:

Passing the heritage of “being American” forward is one of the key elements of my creating the Vassar Bushmills site in 2011; to identify the key elements of being American, or “American Exceptionalism” as I catalogue it.

You can simply browse my site here at VassarBushmills.com, by category, to see the areas of Natural Law and American Exceptionalism I think are important for my generation being able to pass onto the next. And I learned them first hand, between 1972 and 2011.

A 39 year trek.

In short, I’m dedicated to the underlying natural laws of comity that causes institutions to succeed and be passed on, generation by generation, and that ours, the American culture, caused such a system to be born with the ability to regenerate itself, something most other countries are unable to do.

I see Twitter, as designed and executed by Jack Dorsey and his mates back in 2006, Dorsey himself younger than my youngest son, as a hook for the coming generations, Millennials and Z, apparently for money, and possibly even for political power, but certainly an entity worth trying to manipulate and influence others for really non-enduring, self-destructive purposes.

I had been on Twitter since around 2011 and largely used the new Twitter site to develop checkmarks of behavior patterns that are very difficult to outgrow without the intervention of third parties, such as successful grownups who’d seen a thing or two…and even God. Even a few with a handy bar of soap.

The majority of my activity at Twitter was to wash several of their preening youngsters’ mouths out with that soap, in a manner of speaking.

So, as far as I’m concerned, I have a $16 cause-of-action against Twitter.

I sent Twitter a note asking what specifically I had done, assuming that only one of two “clerk”-type people at Twitter would actually know what that was. Their reply was non-responsive to my specific question. But I noticed last week they’d gone ahead and withdrawn another $8 from my bank account, even though they are continuing to limit me to read-only or watch-only films about cats and other pets, or Senegalese folk songs, basic tripe for most viewers, and no current politics to speak of, generational or otherwise, in my time line and a total absence of all those 19-thru-50 year-old spoiled leftwing influencers, who had infested my timeline for months, showing up at my site when I turned Twitter on at 5-6 AM several hours after they had posted their catty remarks. They were placed in my timeline because of some algorithm or specific intent to annoy.

When uninvited guests come into my House and then cast aspersions on everything I believe to be either holy, or, survival-enhancing, which I’ve spent 1000’s of words detailing at this site, my options are to either ignore them by not responding, or to block them, or three, piss them off by pinching them where it may hurt, but also possibly to cause them to pause and reflect.

There are dozens of Gen Z’s and Millennials I want to be able to make squirm, and usually in 200 characters or less so I would appreciate if Elon Musk would so order…or, return my $16. My wife has 13 cats, so I get no added pleasure in watching pets be made to appear cute. I have learned much about the mindset, and short range of the thinking of these influencers. Neither facts nor understanding the survival benefits of truth influences their rhetoric.

In discussing “how things should work” in the natural world of Millennials and Gen Z’s, including Li’l Davie Hogg’s, not to mention awkward JerzeeMoms and Brooklyndad’s, I only wish to identify them. Someday, some way, many will have a crucible from which, if they survive it with body fully intact, and are only forced to sulk away, such knowlegde may save their lives, but also the sort of free civilization our forefathers created here over 250 years ago.

Today we are standing athwart two generations that are perfectly capable of destroying the essential ingredients of America. Ancient histories have left all sorts clues as to what then happens next. That is a serious topic, and one that will carry on here.