Breaking out of shame with the help of the Law of One, Michael Teachings, and the Enn

[Questioner]

What is the Group W bench? Pardon, Q? --fairyfarmgirl

Arlo Guthrie made a famous story song called Alice's Restaurant, which is about 20 minutes long. He rambles along with a very shaggy story, apparently building up to a point but with a lot of humorous diversions and reversals along the way. If you have a spare 20 minutes, look it up on Youtube, you'd get a kick out of it. The story was expanded to a feature movie which I haven't seen.

If you're short on time, here's a summary that spoils the surprise:

In the story, friends of Arlo's hosted a nice Thanksgiving dinner. In appreciation, Arlo did a favor: he took the friends' excess trash to the city dump. The dump was closed for Thanksgiving, so Arlo dumped the trash by the road. The police noticed the pile and figured out that Arlo was the culprit. As a result of trying to do the favor, he was arrested for littering, forced to clean up the garbage, and now had a criminal conviction on his police record.

Later, when Arlo was drafted by the military, his prior conviction record as a litterbug made him flunk out as a suspected ex-con, too immoral to beat up innocent civilians. The Group W bench was where ex-cons had to prove to the recruiter that they'd since been rehabilitated into productive members of society. Comparing littering to the atrocities of the Vietnam War, Arlo suspected he was actually the moral one there. When Arlo pointed out this irony to the recruiting officer, they considered him a threat to national security.

Arlo's recommendation to the audience is that if one's ever drafted for the military, they should sing a few bars of "Alice's Restaurant" to the recruiter. This will create such a backlog of passive resistance that the military establishment breaks down. That would be a great time for everyone to go to Alice's for a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat.