Ice Cream Socialists

Gold King Mine, Jerome AZ

 

We are social creatures who have social skills, develop social networks, join social clubs, and live social lives in social circles.

Universities teach sociologists to work for social betterment and social welfare, and social security keeps seniors from starving.

“Social Studies” is the class grade school kids hate least.

Trestles Beach, San Clemente CA

We all make social calls, whether social butterflies, socialites, social climbers, or, like myself, socially retarded and lacking social grace. Even churches have their redeeming Ice Cream Socials. If social-ism is “evil”, we all have sinned!

Everyone loves (or, to feel socially accepted, pretends to love) the gigantic and Godly United States military; its shared food, housing, and medicine make it, by definition, almost totally socialist.

Professional police harassment, fire crews, a “justice” system, sewage treatment, public health, landfills, city planning—all socialist plots! Your public library is 100% socialist! Hoo-ray!

Phoenix AZ back yard

It’s OK to live alone and try to do everything yourself, but you are much more likely to survive in the society of fellow humans, no matter how dumb they usually seem. Always better to join society, enter the social contract to share and get along as sociably as possible.

Petrified Forest National Park, AZ

Let us now open our Holy Effing Bibles, to the socialist teachings of Jesus Christ:

 “If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic…. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back…. ...love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back.” Luke 6:29, 30, & 35, NIV.

Beaver Creek, AZ

So of course the first Christians were socialists:

 “All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.” Acts 2:44-45 NIV.

In theory, all organized religion is socialist, redistributing “tithes” and “offerings” to promote social equality, social justice, social welfare, sometimes even a social gospel, and, by golly, good old Ice Cream Socials. (And perhaps a nice new car for the Pastor.)

Despite what’s taught in church and school, socialism ain’t necessarily bad. The key to success, for every social organization: don’t put a bunch of dicks in charge.

Gold King Mine, Jerome AZ

The sociopathic Owners, who get stuck with the check, may boo-hoo, but where did they get their money? From society and our common socioeconomic system. When the Owners have all the money, what are the rest of us supposed to do? The kindergarten rule still holds: Share, you tightfisted crybabies! Or would you prefer social unrest, social upheaval, social disintegration, social collapse, and/or social ruin? Maybe we could work it out over a bowl of ice cream.

Gold King Mine, Jerome AZ

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Chewy snack to avoid: Rigley’s Experimint Gum.

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Solved: The Chicken/Egg riddle: The egg first, early in the day; the chicken not till suppertime. Both, preferably, fried.

What I Live For

Besides intimate marital activity, this is what I live for.

Black Canyon, AZ

Spring sun, third son, saunter day. Already desert Arizona hot, off-trail to a little known waterhole, in one of the many canyons named “Black.”

Black Canyon AZ

 

No trail, steep loose rock. Snake season greetings!

No tourists at this destination. Water and bird song.

Black Canyon AZ

Swam in this lower pool, sweet painfully cold.

Black Canyon AZ

Snow melt trickle in a side canyon, tasty!

 “Through no wisdom of its own, but out of necessity, industrial civilization… is now forced to realize that there are limits, and that there is a life-support system composed of millions of subsystems all working or playing together with amazing grace.”

                                      --Gary  Snyder,  A Place in Space, p. 98

Stock Racket Inequity

When stock markets rise, who cares? We should boo, not cheer.

Jerome AZ

Electro-Doo-Dad Inc. ships its Useless Thingy factory to where the hungriest work cheapest. Stock goes up.

Grey Planet Industries swallows Superfluous Appliance Manufacturing; redundant thousands begin Government Cheese diet, remaining slaves must now work too much. Stock goes up.

Owners shuffle papers, goose computers, bribe legislators, downsize, cut pay, reduce bennies, screw or boot the actual doers of work. Stocks go up.

Instead: “News” people: add up every stock exchange in the world, and put a minus sign in front of it. Call it the Blown Jones Human Misery Index. Would make more sense for we of the real world.

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Solar dryer fail

Speaking of reality: instantly save a sphincter-load of 

electricity by drying your clothes with the Gigantic Sky Orb. If stormed upon, as pictured, a bonus: “rainwater fresh,” for freakin’ free! Acid rain? Acid wash! No worries, harried launderers, the Orb always works, eventually.

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Camp Verde AZ

“Our capacity for empathy is why the reality of war is usually kept from us or delivered in measured, manipulative doses—our wounded, perhaps, but not theirs, or those of our wounded who make for uplifting stories, but not those who are severely mutilated. And we face choices about how we live, because we are implicated.”

--Rebecca Solnit, from The Separating Sickness, Harper’s Magazine, June 2013.

Good News, Improved!

Dead Horse Ranch State Park, AZ

  

Shabbat, the Sabbath, is a rare thing: a happy religious rule--one we need more of. Take a day off? Yes Lord I will! Easiest commandment ever! Also a great equalizer: take away our jobs and our playtime nonsense and we are all pretty much the same specks in the Cosmos.

No matter Whom or What they worship, everyone in this godforsaken United States needs a day off work. This should be rigorously enforced, but only with cultural pressure--police need a break too. Workaholics, halt! Moms, spend a day in the sunshine drinking beer. Even criminals, bankers, and criminal bankers, should rest from their labors at least one outta seven.

Prescott AZ, courthouse square

Close every place of business, unplug every electro-gadget. Lie around and think and talk, walk around the neighborhood. Save all the money everyone would have spent. Society would change dramatically with obedience to this simple command from the Judeo/Christian/Islamic Invisible Super-Being. Take a day off, for Christ’s sake, and make it holy!

(Side-note to True Believers: wanting to eat at Denny’s after church does not constitute “an ox fallen into a pit.” Luke 14:5 KJV)

Dead Horse Ranch State Park, AZ

Better yet--if the Eternal Dude needed one day of rest, shouldn’t Mortal Dudes and Dudines get two, or five? The Torah was oral tradition for centuries before it was written down, say scholars; every word was personally dictated by Yahweh, argue the sheep; both can agree that someone muffed the punt on this one. All it would have taken is one brave storyteller to change the narrative a bit...

 “And on the fourth day, God realized He’d been working too much, what was the hurry after all? 

 "So He took the rest of the afternoon off, and blessed the fifth, sixth, and seventh days for fun, and long naps.

 "Thus it was decreed for eternity.” 

 Or if taking dictation, a prophet/secretary intimate enough with the Lord to argue: “One day off a week? Are you kidding me? Not another dagesh unless we all get weekends off!”

(Informational tidbit: It was labor unions, not the Lord or his prophets, who brought us the modern two-day “week-end." Praise be unto them!)

Dead Horse Ranch State Park AZ

Employed humans in the United States already work more hours than the rest of the world. You don’t need a second job, you need a second day off. Money and success are not God, despite what some of the wackier preachers yack. Every second you spend working for something other than food and shelter is wasted. Screw fashion and fancy stuff, take another day off instead.

And woe unto them who spend those blessed days in church, forced to worship their Metaphysical Magician from inside a building! Better to worship the Wonderful World: the friends and family you love, at a lake, a forest, or a dirt backyard. Even a saloon is better than church--you can leave any time without passing rows of self-righteous eyeballs. I remember as a less and less devout youth, looking out the high church windows at a blue spring sky, and realizing deep in my soul: “If I was God...I sure as heck wouldn’t hang round this boring-ass place.”

Dead Horse Ranch State Park AZ

More Sabbath! We could pray daily worldwide for more days off, or simply re-unionize. Better yet: I have as much right to speak for “God” as any other self-appointed moron. I know in my heart She wants us to have three-day weekends forever. Be it so decreed. Now let us go forth, and spread the joy of more time off, and hope of fun: a New and Improved Gospel!

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Prescott AZ

“The infantile dream-state of the mass man is so unrealistic that he never thinks to ask who is paying for this paradise. The balancing of accounts is left to a higher political or social authority, which welcomes the task, for its power is thereby increased; and the more power it has, the weaker and more helpless the individual becomes.”
― Carl Gustav Jung, (1875-1961)