It's all in the rub

I guess I am a counter-culturist at heart.  But, there have been others, and they have been very famous and influential: Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson (at the top of the list).  Every poet probably qualifies as a counter-culturist, particularly so, though, Gwendolyn Brooks, e.e. cummings, and Walt Whitman.  And there have been those standouts through time like Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Leonardo Di Vinci, Herodotus, ad infinitum.  So, I love it when the status quo gets challenged.

People get comfortable in their routines, which is why routines exist.  But, when routines that work for a few are made into routines that become law for everyone, I get disgusted because precious little is a one-size-fits-all shirt for all to wear. Certainly business in the world knows the beauty of custom design.  Something simple like a pen has so many variations that it is hard to describe their appearance anymore.  The clothing industry for sure knows not to make clothes look alike.  Ask someone about what (s)he likes in a car, and you would get many different answers.  The car industry knows that.

Then there are the social sciences.  They seem to be shielded from the reality of the colors that exist in life.  Psychologists, for the most part, have tried to reduce the study of personality to 4 or 5 traits and put those traits in a test for people to take and match to.  Educators want to reduce everything to a 4-core curriculum and create tests to compare everyone to.  Politicians want to reduce society to blocks of voters and make laws that benefit those blocks.  Athletes get reduced to skill sets and traded as a commodity to teams needing those skill sets.

So I applaud people like Freud and Piaget who refused to have their thinking reduced to match some known model.  I laud educators like Dewey, Montessori, and the founders of the University of Phoenix who know that education cannot be done in a cookie-cutter factory.  I support people like Noam Chomsky, Ted Kennedy, and Ron Paul who try to get people to see that routines need to shaken up once in a while so that progress doesn't pass us by.  And I love to follow teams whose owners know to stick with a player and not abandon him if he gets hurt or goes through a slump like Robert Kraft's Patriots, Nolan Ryan's Rangers, and Jerry Buss' Lakers.

In order to get a spark to start a fire, a person has to rub two sticks together or two flint rocks against each other.  Progress depends on the rub, not the straightjacket.