We are because of Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 - October 5, 2011).

We are because of Steve Jobs

We are because of Steve Jobs

We are because of Steve Jobs

We are because of Steve Jobs

We are because of Steve Jobs

We are because of Steve Jobs

Pledge Tones Counseling Session #1, Part IV

Counseling Session #1, Part IV

Pledge Tones: There is a perspective that I would like to introduce into our discussion today, which involves an excerpt from an iBook already loaded onto that iPad. For convenience, I have an iPad with me as well with the same iBook therefore we can be on the same page at the same time figuring out the information together from this distance so you may comfortably decide whether you would like a copy of the iBook and, if so, what format you prefer, digital or print. Handling the iPad at the start of every session allows the patient familiarization with the device well before I begin referring to specifics like the iBook I am directing our attention towards momentarily.   

Client: Yes. Let me just wrap up here. You’re right. The iPad is really soothing and keeps one alert throughout the counseling process. I actually was looking at images of battlefields from the First World War and could not forget the observation my fellow veteran friend made some time ago. You can love or hate and then dislike or like. It is possible, you can love but dislike and hate but like. And it is truths like these that the GOP doesn’t grasp and misinterprets in their own barbarity with such sickening linearity.

Pledge Tones: Speaking of linearity, the diagram I have chosen for us to review is a result of my having read that the psychologist Abraham Maslow never intended for his hierarchical human needs list to be interpreted as a pyramidal construct. After much careful studying and review, I have come to see Maslow’s hierarchical construct as a star embodiment of all humankind. I took Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing and placed a star atop the sketch of the Vitruvian male as to delete gender specifications and help others see another interpretation of Maslow’s model framework.

Client: So the star is essentially and roughly representing the human body without gender identification?

Pledge: Yes. Humans must learn to stand up as a milestone in their development but if they do not have their physiological and safety needs met, all is definitely not viable for them to begin to take their first steps in any societal construct. Humans learn to build relationships with others and cannot even begin to embrace such an endeavor without their love and belonging and esteem needs being addressed and met. And, finally, everybody has the full potential to be given the right to exercise their intelligence and creativity and the skills set they have attained and are pursuing in order to make a living and engage in a self-constructed lifestyle. In a consumerism model these needs are allotted price tags and income differentials that separate certain consumers into a categorical class or group. And, of course, the heart of the matter is self-transcendence, which is exploited by the consumerist status quo quite vulgarly.

Client: Speaking of the vulgar consumerist status quo, how can one meditate and live one’s best life without having his or her physiological and safety needs met? And isn’t that the root of evil? To tell a person without the means to stand up on his or her feet to embrace his or her inner sanctum and emerge out of poverty and the pain of hunger and thirst alone is corruption.

Pledge Tones: I agree.

Client: How would you respond to the media’s identifying 2016 contender and cheat Jeb Bush as a foreign policy hawk?

Pledge Tones: There’s a new term to describe the status quo buying the elections in the United States these days, newscasters referring to these cheats as the donor class while refusing to cover the plight of the disenfranchised American constituencies facing horrific climate changes involving hills of snow expected to not melt until this May in communities across the country.   

Client: I find it offensive. The GOP is not comprised of hawks but, at least, bloodcurdling buzzards that feed off carrion, don’t you think? Let’s go back to the case in point earlier with the 2005 forced migration of Israeli settlers from Palestine to Israel by then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, with the support of George Walker Bush’s Administration, including then-Secretary of State Condi Rice’s recommendations.

Pledge Tones: Of course.

Client: The private sectoring of public endeavors such as systems of federal government while subjecting vulnerable citizens to endure physical displacement and economic devastation statewide doesn’t work. Private companies attempted to establish stability in Palestine after 2005 but their efforts proved to be not enough. The farmers in Gaza disposed of their produce as goat feed by 2006, despite investments to rescue their greenhouses by the Palestine Economic Development Company.    

Pledge Tones: The agreements reached by the Israelis with the Palestinians went unimplemented or not honored at all, which led to the political unrest that became a violent back-and-forth between Fatah and Hamas in Palestine. Did George Walker Bush maneuver with the worst intensions for the Palestinians and Israelis because of personal bias, prejudice for the Muslims and Jews, although the truth being much different with all three faiths, including Christians, coexisting in relative peace?

Client: Considering covert treaties between outside nations and/or organizations on how to divide the area—despite internal opposition—have subjected all three faiths in the region to unimaginable injustices since the First World War, I’d say that the status quo deliberately moves backwards in time because of the fear of a diversified and competitive economy, especially in their own households.   

Pledge Tones: In 1916, Britain, France, and Russia were not transparent in developing plans to divide up the remains of the Ottoman Empire, the Arab World, as would befit them. In 1918, the League of Nations issued mandates that allowed the British occupation of Palestine and to enforce the settlement of Jews in Palestine despite riots against such an immigration policy from within, which led England to construct quotas that led to armed rebellions between 1932 and 1939, culminating in the partition of Palestine in 1939 after England refused to allow elections there and the vast suffering as a result of depressed economies worldwide.                       

Client: What about ethics in leadership? Falsely putting on an empathic political theatre with speeches like the ones George Walker Bush haggardly blew through with the national press corps agreeing to interrupt regular programming on their major networks whenever Bush 43 coughed phlegm. I remain convinced that the only way to continue ahead is with a Kennedy alongside Hillary Rodham Clinton. Clinton 42 is too enamored by the coughed phlegm of 43 and the façade of 41 to be of any service to our country. (To be continued…)

Pledge Tones Counseling Session #1, Part III

Counseling Session #1, Part III

Client: I believe that 9/11/01 was a coordinated effort by the oil and gas companies to bring the world back into the black and white contrast that was beginning to blur and as a result starting to unite the world in a new paradigm that the globe had never underwent. The Clinton Surplus was still in effect and George Walker Bush’s worldview was narrowly focused on creating an environment of chaos and mismanagement within Iraq as his father had begun a decade earlier in order to secretly expand the family dynasty, also heavily bound by oil and gas and untraceable as a result of foreign bank accounts.

Pledge Tones: The lack of transparency is a certainty in neoconservative foreign affairs?

Client: To have a personal financial interest in the collapse of an entire people is unfathomable. But the approach we took as early as Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, the formation of the League of Nations and our eventual entry into World War I are not to be taken as successes or failures, but both because there was a defeat but no comprehensive rebuilding of the economies of those who had been overcome. And let’s remember that the Democratic President Wilson was practicing an entirely different game plan in domestic affairs back in the United States, agreeing to the segregation of federal employees and keeping mum instead of establishing clear boundaries between state rights and the role of federal government, particularly when California wanted to pass legislation barring Japanese from owning land in the state.         

Pledge Tones: The Central Powers included not just Germany and Austria-Hungary, but the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria as well. The League of Nations came after the Paris Peace Conference that took place with the Big Four- United States, England, Italy, and France- deciding the fate and future of the Central Powers, which involved the redrawing of boundaries and territories, with the Ottoman Empire ceasing to exist on the world map as it had before the First World War?

Client: Yes. Our 1917 entry into World War I came before the formation of the League of Nations in 1920. But the new millennium has advanced beyond the foot soldiering and territorial conquests the neoconservatives have been hung up on since the World Wars. When Herbert Walker Bush began the Iraq War and George Walker continued with Iraq II and Afghanistan I, both father and son created an atmosphere of such intense havoc and heartache and hell in the Middle East and the United States that I’m certain Jeb Bush is betting to win 2016 with the corporate corruption inherent in American politics and media thanks to the deadly dynastic deeds of 41 and 43, which included participants from all walks of government, legislative and judicial, degrading democratic values in favor of personal financial wealth.

Pledge Tones: Did the wounds of the World Wars ever heal? How so?

Client: No. Neoconservatives take great strides to repeat history’s cruelties and keep the wounds afresh. Progressives today must make arrangements to be in attendance when Bibi Netanyahu addresses the United States Congress. If not, the GOP will have leverage to sabotage all progressive agendas at home on the basis of party line disengagement, a unilateral tactic that has never proved possible of bringing anything constructive to the table in international affairs. Imagine Boehner and McConnell being given free reign over all our lives because of such a misstep by Pelosi and Reid. Look at the tragedies brought on by the late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengaging Israel from Gaza in 2005, with endorsement by George Walker 43 and his stilted administration officials calling the shots, like then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Pledge Tones: Neoconservative media machines are reporting Condoleezza Rice as the leading candidate in the race to succeed California Senator Barbara Boxer who is retiring in 2016. The heinousness that Sharon and Rice implemented and oversaw went underreported by the United States Press Corps.       

Client: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon spoke in convoluted terms throughout the process, the same fashion by which both Bush Administrations misled us with outright lies about the state of world affairs necessitating warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s the strategy of the GOP: Create any basis for active warfare in diverse regions of the world with American boots on the ground and oversee the deterioration of the middle and working classes at home by cutting benefits and safety nets for the impoverished. By following through with brute agendas like these, the GOP leaders pocket government money with lax regulations that allow them to deposit their spoils into offshore bank accounts. Money is their only motivation when they parade into the White House, having taken control of both houses of Congress, and bought all the male justices on the Supreme Court.

Pledge Tones: Citizens United?

Client: It’s more than Citizens United. It is the top 1% fearing and loathing integrative perspectives that could heal the pain of the world and keep us all out of war. But that would involve egalitarian strides that the status quo is unwilling to take, shunning multiculturalism instead for unilateral quick fixes that result in horrific long-term trauma. Look how Ariel Sharon toppled the infrastructure in Palestine before and during the forced migration of Israelis from their homes in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. You cannot uproot sectors of civilization from such settlements without dire consequences in the new millennium. And, ironically, Benjamin Bibi Netanyahu was one of the fiercest opponents to Sharon’s plans to evacuate and then demolish the Israeli Settlements in Palestine. The Palestinians even disagreed with Sharon’s plans, insisting that the then-Israeli Prime Minister Sharon get Israelis to tear down the synagogues left remaining in the physical wreckage because the Palestinians refused to desecrate those houses of worship left behind.        

Pledge Tones: The plans to compensate settlers for making the move from Palestine to Israel fell apart like the promises made by proponents of the Keystone XL Pipeline never materialized into the millions of dollars agreed to in false ads and industry reps who built up the hopes of American homeowners door-to-door to attain rights to frack essentially in their backyards without insurance for damages incurred in the process.

Client: Netanyahu foresaw the outcomes of Sharon’s plans and watched with such incredible strength and restraint all that unfolded despite his own efforts to counter the ongoing slaughter at every step. Administrators and cabinet members were removed from office and referendums were subject to oversight before Sharon finally gained the authority to provoke such disdainful destruction of the Israeli Settlements. (To be continued…)

Pledge Tones Counseling Session #1, Part II

Counseling Session #1, Part II

Client: Tom Brady hasn’t brought back the glory days of Joe Montana’s calls on the football field, has he? No. Joe Montana was a coach-quarterback combination player on and off the football field. Where has that sportsmanship gone? The National Football League needs an algorithm to measure the missed timings on the football field made by Tom Brady and the Patriots. Remember the time where there was no player available for Tom Brady to throw the ball to in the middle of the game? Yeah. Tom Brady’s a chronic cheater with this being the first championship win since the spy-gate saga.

Pledge Tones: There is a history of behind-the-scenes violations that make the current win just as stale with unfairness?

Client: Yes and I remain steadfast convinced that Brady already knew the Seahawks’ blueprints. The last play was interpreted as being a miscalculation on the part of the Seattle Seahawks, with Coach Carroll taking full responsibility for that call. Tom Brady’s movement and momentum are not breathtaking like Joe Montana’s and lack the fluidity that accompanies fair play. I thought Katy Perry’s insistence afterwards that folks not be allowed to replicate and sell the shark costumes from her halftime performance laughable.

Pledge Tones: The shark costumes were extraordinarily banal. There is an undeniable zest and vigor present in fair play. The accompanying exhilaration on the victors’ faces is palpable. But it wasn’t present at the conclusion of this year’s Super Bowl, was it?

Client: Speaking of fair play, the American Press Corps has never had consistency in movement and momentum has it? Its playbook is just as riddled with missed timings. The double talk by the status quo is achingly obvious to audiences worldwide and the resultant double takes by the American Press Corps are just horrific. Look at the NCAA reinstating Penn State’s 112 wins with Joe Paterno, the coach who provided a safe haven to the serial child molester Jerry Sandusky, the assistant coach who was convicted of 45 counts of child molestation in 2012. And yet Little League International is revoking the national championship from Chicago’s Jackie Robinson West team on the grounds of a technicality that their attorney Victor Henderson is investigating whether or not was deliberately propelled forth to single out this particular youth team for errors clearly made by management at the start of the season.      

Pledge Tones: The Little League International organization seems to have overlooked the need to necessitate such an investigation at the beginning of the Little League World Series.

Client: And to subject all the teams in the League to such technicalities from the start. Reminds me of how Speaker of the House John Boehner misreports the truth of the matter with Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama and the American Press Corps insists upon taking sides with Speaker Boehner and reporting unfounded animosity from within the White House towards the Israeli Prime Minister when in fact the GOP and likeminded Democrats are only distracting from the fact that they are attempting to place the nation in peril through not continuing funding the Department of Homeland Security in another one of their efforts to get the American people to criticize the Obama Administration for problems that the Congressional Republican Majority is ill-prepared and unwilling to study and debate and resolve, just like President George Walker Bush’s eight years of creating such global crises as to warrant the designing of the Department of Homeland Security. Goodness! I know the national press corps has mortgages to pay and family lives, but the bigotry has gotten unbearable. It was painfully apparent in the Saturday Night Live 40^th Anniversary Special, the three and a half hour plummet due to Lorne Michaels’ neediness to be put on a pedestal. The first hour held a lot of promise but that too began to wane as time went on and on and on and on. Did you watch?

Pledge Tones: Yes. You brought up how bigotry was painfully apparent in the broadcast, which tethered on its creator’s need to be glorified. Would you assess the Congressional Republican Majority similarly?

Client: How so exactly?

Pledge Tones: In terms of the need to hear praises for oneself being sung aloud, would you categorize the United States Congress as having a similar pomp and performance deficits due to an undiversified majority?

Client: Sure. And that’s the kicker. The names present at the SNL special all agreed that the evening was like a high school reunion. Have there been studies done where researchers have recorded the interaction amongst attendees of high school reunions and found out the degree to which race plays a factor in how those present at such functions congregate? As the SNL gathering went on, this particular elephant in the room appeared to balloon out at an increasingly faster rate. I think the same can be said of Speaker Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. They address the press like they’re the President of the United States. It brings to bare the fact that the GOP is interfering haphazardly in already deep and troubling waters of international diplomacy, equivocating domestic legislation anyway they can, including sending punting squanderers like Scott Walker, Chris Christie, and Rand Paul on whirlwind tours abroad when their own states of Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Kentucky are struggling in a twentieth century corporate takeover of statewide government that is reminiscent of fascism and state capitalism that the GOP shamelessly accuses President Putin of practicing in efforts by Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers to create another Cold War with Russia so the Bush Dynasty and they can take over the oil and gas infrastructure in Russia and Ukraine and the European Union in their drive for totalitarian supremacy.

Pledge Tones: How would you recommend we as a global society counter the oil and gas infrastructures and move into an era of new wealth and an egalitarian economic model of human interaction?

Client: The blueprints made available by Tesla Motors could be utilized to bring about global liberation from classes and castes and nepotistic domination that are inherent in the GOP’s oil and gas plans for tomorrow. President Putin’s seriously considering liberating Russia from oil and gas commerce models and constructing solar farms and solar engineering firms that embrace the worker as not just an employee but a stockholder too. Have you ever noticed how Wal-Mart employees used to be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with company executives and there was a real movement and momentum forward that dissolved after 9/11/01?

Pledge Tones: Yes? (To be continued…)

Self-Transcendence: Maslow for the 21st Century

Counseling Session #1, Part I

Client: You know, Pledge. I’ve got to ask you. As a mental health counselor, why can’t your professional peers voice the pain and frustrations of so many like myself? I wake up every morning and don’t know whether I will be faced with the death of or an epic struggle with the war veteran I assist with day-to-day activities, which include some serious talks about reasons to live, and how to thrive in the face of so many psychological traumas endured on the war front and upon returning home to the callousness of public officials who refuse to budget benefits for those of us who sacrificed the unimaginable horrors that many of our fellow military and civilian brothers and sisters did not get the chance to survive.  

Pledge Tones: You bring up an important concern about mental health professionals not appearing enough in public to address psychological trauma and the long-term effects of humanity’s bravest having to soldier physical and mental wounds silently, the scars not having set in when added stressors like the lack of means to subsist in society with one’s dignity and integrity due to politics on Capitol Hill drive one to the extremes of reconsidering the calculus of life and death altogether with uncertainty.

Client: I have to also say that it frustrates me when people in your profession look down upon the general public. I mean, I’ve been in therapy many times where I’ve felt as if I was being told nonsense clichés like how people have enough on their plates to really care about what’s on mine and therefore I should reprogram me to keep myself focused on my appetite, or that redundant serenity prayer that your colleagues recommend incessantly- God give the strength to accept the things I can’t change and the courage to change the things I can before concluding, of course, with the wisdom to know the difference between those two scenarios.

Pledge Tones: I agree. You’ve just about had it with the repetitiousness, haven’t you?

Client: Of course! There’s got to be some way to subdue the egos of counselors, don’t you think?

Pledge Tones: There is the theory of paraprofessional intervention that surfaced in family therapy techniques in the 1970s, but was abandoned by therapists almost immediately and has been rejected by some state chapters of the National Association of Social Workers even into today, particularly in Texas. As you described your role in the life of the war veteran you assist, I was reminded of an article I read a decade ago that addressed how the nursing profession had embraced a new model of intervening on behalf of clients by recruiting and training paraprofessionals to fill positions otherwise occupied by professionally trained registered nurses who now are able to oversee community wide management of social projects based in neighborhoods where the disenfranchised remain isolated and unaddressed.

Client: Could I be considered a paraprofessional in Texas? If not Texas, then where else would I qualify? Would my war veteran friend be better served elsewhere and where would that be? Even I know that the United States Congress is overreaching its constitutional parameters! Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell think they can maneuver around established protocols because “the American people overwhelmingly voted for the Republican Party” in last year’s elections, as the GOP and likeminded Democrats have wanted to lead US to believe while they collect money right and left through powerbrokers and peddlers for nineteenth century infrastructure at home and policies abroad. Look at Fort Worth, Texas! We’ve got highways that our local officials advertised as a move forward for all Tarrant County residents with promises of rebuilding downtown into another San Antonio-like tourist attraction. The highways are extensive but expensive because there are toll rates involved, the result being the roads and projects essentially go unused.

Pledge Tones: Bureaucracies need to embrace multifaceted models, meaning that case aides, student interns, community workers, and volunteers must be valued as brokers in the helping professions in this new millennium alongside the licensed and degreed. In fact, the case aides, student interns, community workers, and volunteers like you could bring down the costs incurred by care facilities and the resulting credit could go towards financing and training paraprofessionals such as yourself to obtain licensure and perhaps even a degree on a part-time basis. There is a chronic shortage of allied health care professionals like social workers and counselors.  

Client: Sounds like those who are licensed and degreed fear that paraprofessionals will lead to their being shortchanged in some way. Doesn’t it sound like the professionals are insecure? I think so. Hey! Pledge! Why aren’t you afraid of clients like me putting you on the spot with questions that obviously must require thought outside of the usual rut? Is it the Proust questionnaire that you had me fill out along with the customary forms? I don’t like bureaucracies myself and think the Progressive Democrats and Secretary of State John Kerry must attend Congress two weeks from tomorrow when Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu addresses the United States Congress. In fact, I think they should design very specific questions for the Israeli Prime Minister to answer upon concluding his speech. What do you think?

Pledge Tones: I agree with you. Just like the need for paraprofessionals in the helping professions is a necessity today due to the way we have evolved and grown as a world, those GOP and likeminded Democrats that you mentioned earlier are overreaching their constitutional parameters but need to be herded back into their unilateral packs by the multilateral Progressive Caucus and the Democrats and Independents who are aligned with the President of the United States and his cabinet.

Client: Speaker John Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell appear to have not settled their inflated egos, have they? I seriously think they and their neoconservative cohort have harassed Benjamin Netanyahu by declaring an early neoconservative win in the 2016 presidential election. The GOP and likeminded Democrats know the playbook finances of the 2016 Elections like New England Patriots’ Quarterback Tom Brady knew the Seattle Seahawks’ blueprints beforehand to instruct that final winning play upset by fellow New Englander Malcolm Butler. (To be continued…)