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Apr 11, 2023
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Amen: "I realized that most successful, happy people are looking for a group to sing with."

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unless they sing Happy Birthday, I would rather not join in. Not even if it were a song of my own church or affiliation. Of course, if it were a Beatles song, I would. That is my age group and does not have to do with personal belief.

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For the record, in my post, I wasn't only referring to that specific song or type of music.

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LOL Ingrid ! Wouldn’t that be fun Maybe over 400 people in Central Park, skating past, biking past, ambling past, or sitting on benches nearby, stopping and singing Happy Borthday …..LOL Hilarious

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I have had the utter glee of joining in with this sort of rag-tag chorus many times. And with people whose religions and political views I had no way of knowing.

This is life

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I have tell this one. Please humour me.

This very first time we met our not-son-in-law, we were strolling through a Canadian historical site. The others had wandered off, so I started a conversation. "Do you like the music of Stan Rogers?"

The young man tosses back his head and belts out "O, the year was seventeen-seventy-eight..."

A disembodied voice from behind a hedge belts back "...how I wish I was in Sharbrooke now!" (Stan Rogers: 'Barrett's Privateers')

We all burst out laughing, of course. Our not-son-in-law (now soon to be daddy of our grandchild) declared that he'd never been prouder to be Canadian.

So I guess that's at least three who'd join in

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I cannot resist a good singalong!

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I would not preemptively miss out. Ideally, I strive to moderate judgment with the experience of shared humanity, which includes shared joy. There are lines I don't want to cross, even when I justly despise people.

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Same.

But I do wonder about the times I've preemptively declined. What did I miss?

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I hear you on that. I know for a fact I've missed some very good times.

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Same.

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I went to see black eyed peas kinda recently but only because i got snuck in for free. Im not a fan of theirs either but the crowds cheeriness was so much fun! And Will i Am made a huge mistake when he called Ireland the UK and boy did he pay for that.

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Yes! I've had unforgettable experiences at concerts in my life.

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I’d like to think I’d join in most legal/ethical/moral scenarios of this nature but I know I wouldn’t be attending anything if I’ve been pre-informed about what I may NOT talk about....

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Likewise...but I'm not feeling confident this is always the best choice.

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Which one? To join our not to join 😉😄

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Not to join (as a strict policy).

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👍🏼 I agree actually. We are to be IN the world yet not OF it. I’m just getting tired of being censored ....

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I feel every single word of your reply.

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Comments all great here, and such fun to see folks chime in, as on a bus, interacting, as if we have a flat tire ….LOL. When I hear that a choir of high schoolers on a plane leads the passengers on a sing along. ….and Yes, I would join in, Mickey, but it would have to do with recognizing the tune, being able to sing harmony, and sensing the music community all together. If the audience had been rude and crude, rowdy and such, and the music the same, I might have left by then. LOL. Interesting to consider the What ifs. Great topic Mickey

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Thank you, as always, Sharon. Based on what I know about you, I could imagine you enthusiastically joining in!

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LOL…..Always nice to be kindly reflected by those around me, when at times I don’t recognize my own Self LOL, again! ~~~~Anyone read that book “The Highly Sensitive Personality” ? Oh right! ! ~~~Some people never heard of it, and need to find it~~~Remarks to me over the years, “you think too much, you’re so intense, you’re so philosophical”. Iz okay if I breathe? ~~~You all are a blessing to me….and yes, I think I would rejoice in the moments we might all sing along, with the ripped jeans, messy hair, deodorant lacking selves…..and fight off the protestors on another corner….. LOL.

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I love this and reminder the simple things that can bring joy in life are free.

Just souls on a journey before all these yahoos start creating reasons to be separate and see others with judgement. Thanks Mickey!!!

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💖

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Yahoos indeed, and they don’t recognize themselves, so sad

But one day they will have to

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I would absolutely join in. When living in NYC I witnessed the most incredible NYC moments that brought me joy and I will never forget. When you are in that place nothing else matters.

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Thank you! I've also had such moments and, to the best of my memory, never regretted joining in.

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Btw, I've gotten a bunch of unsubscribes since this post went live.

0 points for self-awareness.

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Hmmmm...weird.🤔

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Seriously? Wowsa...

Wondering how, or why, this post was so triggering to them?

In response to your question: I used to spontaneously break into song which would turn into "sing-a-longs" when I worked on a cruise ship.

I'm known to chair groove when at a stop-light and hear something grooveable blasting from my radio or in other cars.

Spontaneous singing and dancing in public gets a thumbs up from me. I participate every chance I get which isn't often of late.

Have you ever watched any "Bald and Bankrupt" vids on YouTube?

His latest offering, recorded on one day in "the most dangerous barrio in South America", kind of made me want to visit Carracas.

Venezuela is a country many have been fleeing (*see reports from Texas border and an "unofficial" Canadian border crossing near Plattsburg) however locals still dance and sing and rap on buses...

There is still spontaneous joy in our troubled world. "Free of charge". (Those 3 words though Mickey... 😉)

https://youtu.be/4ijIo8X2_h4

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I think people are ratting on themselves when they are triggered by these words.

Anyway, thanks for sharing and I'll have to check out that YouTube channel!

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Aww!? Welp, guess they're singing along to a different tune.

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Labels are divisions, learn to live without them with love for all ❤️

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Thank you. It's a fundamental message but one that bears constant repetition.

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Agree! Every day new divisions are introduced and pushed. United we stand, divided we fall is never more apparent than now. 😳

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💕

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Ha! I just did a lecture of sorts to a friend the other day. She actually listened! She started out telling me that a friend said, "I love Trump!" To which she replied, "Well, I hate Trump!". I asked how that made her feel, and if it improved the conversation or the relationship. I asked her what it solved and what it changed. She started laughing, "Nothing, I guess." I said, "exactly! What's important is our relationships, not that other crap!"

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Yes!!!! 💕

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I like people. And I like doing things with people. And if you are a people, we are good to go.

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Likewise, my friend!

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Love everything about this video and your post!!! Group joy is my fav thing ever; an o.g. and natural energy source!

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Thank you, Malika! You're a one-person generator of joy.

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🤣OMG, I just laughed out loud, startling the cat out of his nap!✨Thx, Mickey!☀️Speaking of, any chance we’ll get updates on Blackie & Chonky this Spring?😻😻🌷

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😻😻

Since Blackie lives in a bodega, I don't visit him all the time. But I see him through the door when I pass and he always has loving attention from customers.

As for Chonky, I literally just got back from visiting him (which I try to do every day). Today, I bought him a small catnip toy and boy, was he thrilled!

Thanks for asking, Malika!

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Ooo, what a meowvelous update!! Blackie is still holding court and Chonky got a new toy!! Awww, yayyy! (Chonky is probably high as a kite by now, LOL)! Thanks so much for the latest cat-scoop!

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Yer most welcome! 💕

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LOL. Meeow

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Social relations are more complex than singalongs. We are in fact effectively associating with others every day with whom we may not have much in common at all. It's called work, something which doesn't necessarily make for experiences of collective joy, however. That's largely because its cooperative nature is enforced, and perverted, by degrees of authoritarian control by owners of our labor like any other commodity.

Ranks of bosses determining the conditions of this wage slavery subordinate workers as cogs in machinery of production at the expense of interpersonal relations. This is drastically exemplified by the assembly line, where there is next to no possibility of bringing one's personal life to work, as that adage of the (un)free market constantly warns against (don't take it personally, it's just bizzness). And advanced scientific management in the digital (c)age makes all of us approximations of atomized automatons. Private tyranny makes work a privatizing assault on human nature and its essential sociality, designed to deprive us of personal integrity by making us strangers to each and all, the micromanaged absolute of divide-and-rule power.

The levels of human alienation created in capitalist societies is not limited to workplaces, even as we spend most of every day if not our entire lifetimes in them, or else scrambling to survive. That we are so dominated by our reductions to labor, though, already argues how its alienating effects can't help but be carried into contexts beyond work. Family life, in whatever form that takes, largely is defined as an extension of market forces, a unit of consumption whose members may remain isolated from one another in privatized cells of electronic programming and mind control, 24/7. Pursuits of leisure largely exist as commodified products of the corporate coup of public commons and private tyranny over erstwhile citizenry little more than anonymous crowds, collectively controlled by spectacle that takes on totalitarian proportions.

False consciousness dispossessing us of our own potentials to co-create another world is necessary to maintain ruling class ideology as the ruling ideas and boundaries of thinkable thought, enabling rule of the many by the few. What happens in times of revolution like ours is that the material forces and institutionalized relations of society are violently disrupted, in this case by a so-called 4th industrial revolution imposed from the top down upon the ranks of us already socially engineered by the Machine. In the process, we are thrown back upon ourselves to choose more than usual how we adapt, or don't, reopening realization of our freedom, or fear, to be, above all to be agents of our own actions beyond the prisons of power over others.

Mutual antagonism or horizontal hostility among exploited and oppressed 'human resources' is built into the nature of class rule, and it's no wonder that with worldwide upheaval of established systems of class society we are witnessing, firsthand, the effects of longstanding polarization among populations which have been socially isolated for a long time, all too often reinforced by singalong routines suppressing while momentarily relieving deeper tension and strife. As Gramsci says, we are living through an interregnum, when the old is dying and the new cannot be born, and a great many morbid symptoms appear.

They're appearing largely because we've lost sustained associations independent of monopoly capital's colonization of our lives, radically deskilling our ability in direct democracy at the roots of our lives, every day, to act as autonomous agents, economically, politically, culturally. If we are to get to where ways of being are to be born for us beyond the new abnormal which the "masters (monsters) of mankind" (Adam Smith) are out to impose on us, that likely will come about as a matter of necessity, for our very survival, (re)building our own cooperative associations as the best humanity has to offer.

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Thanks for "explaining" all of that to me. 🙄

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Loved this piece of yours -- thank you! -- and I wrote about it: https://sanefrancisco.substack.com/p/how-free-thinking-are-we-really

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Thank you!

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