Part I: Regret and Consolation

Regret and Consolation

I began telling this story, in part where referenced in the Introduction to this work, as a reunion-styled hobby pertaining to a history of a group of people once known as the Westbury Rebels of Houston, Texas, graduating classes of 1962-1965. From that research, experience and effort, which has encompassed almost a decade, I've had one salient regret, which I express here. Illness precluded me from being able to publish all the stories of extra-, but what was humbly believed virtually by each principal to be "just," -ordinary life produced in the otherwise dramatic reality of that population. But the truth is that not only were they particularly NOT ordinary, at least all of the time, but they were special in their remarkability to meet that which befell them.

It wasn't only the rigors of daily life that confronted those early Westbury Rebels as they graduated into adult reality. But due to the technologically-influenced globalization of the world, these, as would turn out, not-so-ordinaries faced over their time and now most recent half century an ideological and methodological confluence of various and differently conceptualized, planet-rule-configured, and almost always conflict-based, which also made them conflicting, approaches to life. Spawned out of that melee and targeting Western civilization's freedom-bulwark, America, externals comprised of psychological-war-adroit hostiles shortened the threat attack corridor with periodic terror-styled taking of life, and national identity-depreciating words. In this strategically invasive form, the offensive trauma/terrorism-inducing onslaughts would place additional and myriad demands — and often without their even being aware, much less understanding of the destructive mechanizations being waged against them — upon these Texas peoples', that is, the referenced Rebels' character. From and to which such challenges, these folks, who otherwise just wanted to mind what they considered to be the managements of their own lives and business, would  rise to better define and then defend, yes fight in their individual and collective and as well both simple and complex manners for this group's millennially developed, but also new and ever-growing, hallmark: freedom. It would be sustained by this bunch of Rebels who — along with the era's other high schoolers and their decedents from the rest of the great state of Texas, and then entire country, America — would take their turn at the responsibility-for-existence helm, and in so doing save that civilization and its notion of Being from extinction.

Although disappointing that those individual stories could not all be told (by me), I have felt consolation in being privileged to participate in the project as a whole, and thus to contribute an interpretation of these people’s importance to the referenced grander scheme of things ─ survival of the freedom-pursuing element of the species: us.