Why do we call it social media?  It’s not at all socially responsible and it is certainly not socially civil.  Its users will blast you with profanity if they disagree with your viewpoint and castigate your intelligence when you don’t march in step with their thinking.  So, instead of ‘social media’ let’s name Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. ad nauseum THE SCOURGE.

The Scourge is our punishment for relinquishing the ability to think and behave responsibly.  Undoubtedly, 95% of those folks, the ones who prolifically pound their keyboards cussing you and me with various impossible acts which we should perform upon ourselves, they would not have an ounce of courage in an up-front, face-to-face encounter.  So there, I’ve said it.  You just take your FB, Twitter, Instagram and assorted other forms of self expression and stick them where the “sun don’t shine.”  Hah! How’s that make you feel? Got a problem with that?  Here’s my address, I’ll be waiting out front at sunup.

You might ask, “Larry, what’s got you so riled this morning?”

Thanks for asking.  I woke up at 1 o’clock AM humming a few bars from ALICE’S RESTAURANT.  Trust me.  Strains from Moonlight Sonata or Frank Sinatra are welcomed music wafting through my head at 1 AM, but not Alice’s Restaurant.  Just like me in the 1960s, Arlo Guthrie also had a hair up his butt about society, particularly the government, the military and the Vietnam War.  I’m over all that 1960s crap, but I still like humming ALICE’S RESTAURANT –

“And can you imagine fifty people a day? I said FIFTY people a day
Walkin’ in, singing a bar of ALICE’S RESTAURANT and walkin’ out? Friends,
They may think it’s a Movement, and that’s what it is, THE Alice’s
Restaurant anti-massacre movement! And all you gotta do to join is to
Sing it the next time it comes around on the guitar”

The anti-massacre movement Arlo wrote about was the resistance to our government’s military draft which was expediting young American men to the jungles of Vietnam. During those years, the journalists whom we trusted to present factual, unbiased news reporting included names such as Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley & Chet Huntley, and Edward R. Murrow.  They gave to us straight-up news – no hype, no entertainment, no bullshit.  We listened to the newscast for half an hour or sometimes an hour and we were then informed citizens able to form rational opinions.

We could have a draft again in America’s future if the current Administration, believing it can institute anything deemed necessary to achieve its military ends, conscripts our young warriors to the sand jungles of the Middle East.  Sadly, today we don’t have much professional journalism to inform us truthfully of world events and political shenanigans.  Instead, we have a proliferation of ‘social media’, most of it posing as newsworthy journalism.

But, thank God I still have at 1 o’clock AM a place to go, a song to sing.  Join me?

“You can get anything you want at Alice’s restaurant
You can get anything you want at Alice’s restaurant
Walk right in, it’s around the back
Just half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want at Alice’s restaurant”

🎶🎶😴

It has never been about Alice or her restaurant.  It was and always is about taking the protest to the streets, to the leaders in DC, speaking truth to power.  Some things never change – the inherent corruption of unbridled power is one.

Pete Seeger knew that, Bob Dylan sang it, Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie had messages that I still hear today.  Times really haven’t changed a whole lot since 1968 and Vietnam.  You can still get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.