My Branch of General Systems Theory
From the 1980s Until Now
The first paper I sent to Bucky was on GST. I know he got lots of papers and on the lecture circuit would sometimes have his assistants go up and down the aisles to collect all the stuff people wanted him to read. That he actually got around to picking mine out of the blizzard and sent a letter on his impressive letterhead, calling it “excellent” made my little heart flutter.
Like Applewhite, I was a fanboy for life. Ed says “first teenage fan” whereas by the time I tuned in Synergetics etc. I was out of college (Princeton) and casting about.
Bonnie DeVarco later said she’d found my paper, and a copy of Bucky’s reply, in one of the boxes. I don’t know that I any longer have a copy of either. The paper, on GST, had to do with Zabaleen in Cairo, a Coptic tribe, relegated to an abandoned quarry in the south part of the city, and responsible for a lot of the recycling. Mom was working with that group. Dad was an employee of the Ministry of Planning (Egypt). I’d been visiting over the summer from New Jersey (returning to Jersey City), thinking about what to do next (I ended up teaching high school for awhile), and wrote this GST piece for Bucky.
I’d been influenced by a lot of other writers already, by the time I wrote that paper, with respect to general systems theory…
