Being A Community Organizer Isn’t As Great As You Might Think

Community Organizing is a tough job, I threw my hat into the political ring as a young man. I ran as the Community Organizer of our little local ranching Community. No one ran against me and I won handily. I was quite impressed with my early success in politics and figured I was on the way up the political ladder. The position of Community Organizer had several responsibilities and people expected a lot from me in this unpaid political position. I rented out the community hall and made sure that all the burnt out light bulbs were replaced, I made sure there was toilet paper in the outhouse and that there were no drunks or animals sleeping in it, I attended the community pasture meetings and listened to the ranchers yell at each other, and I was in charge of the community grave yard.

The perks in this job were limited, actually they were so limited, I am not sure what they were. There were no female lobbyists trying to induce me into dubious deals with sex and money, there were no kick backs or lucrative deals; I actually had to take money out of my own pocket to keep things operating in the black and I usually swept and mopped the community hall myself because there was no money to hire anyone, what a job!

I caught a lot of flack once, I missed seeing a wasp nest when I was getting the outhouse ready at the community hall for a wedding and was treated to the sight of the bride running out of the outhouse screaming without her knickers or anything below the waist with a flock of wasps in hot pursuit. Now, I thought it was hilarious, but everyone was mad at me, like I had played a joke on the bride.

The final incident, that convinced me to throw in the towel was when we had three deaths and had to bury several people in the community graveyard at the same time. People usually had their family plots all paid for well in advance and they were planning on being planted next to loved ones while they sat out the long wait through eternity. It was my job to outline the individual plots and to make sure the backhoe dug up the right grave sites. Usually it was simple enough, I had a plot map and everything was going well until we had a hunter die that no one wanted, and then big Harold died and he was almost 500 pounds, and Ethel died, a tiny Basque woman.

The hunter was being guided by my native friend Bert, he was the only man I’d ever met with greener eyes than me and he stood six foot five, a height that I envied because of only being six foot two. I was in the base hunting camp when he rode up from a tent camp about five miles away. He said there was something wrong with his hunter, because he wouldn’t wake up. Apparently Bert peeked into the tent and yelled out his name, but the hunter wouldn’t get up. I asked if he might be dead. Bert said he didn’t know for sure, so I better ride over with him and check him out to see if he was dead. I said, “Bert, I have a hunter who expects to go hunting today, can’t you go inside and check to see if he is dead?”

Bert shook his head and said, “no, I no go in tents with dead men.”

I could see that this was going nowhere fast, so Bert and I rode over to his camp and I walked in and sure enough his hunter was deader than and Hell. This was going to mess up all my plans for the day. We laced Bert’s hunter on the back of a pack horse and headed back to base camp. I left my hunter with Bert, because there was no way in Hell he was going to pack a dead man out by himself. Natives are kind of funny about some things, dead people and Grizzlies are two of them.

I packed him out to my boss’s camp and he told me I had made a mistake, he said the RCMP would have wanted to look around to see if there was foul play. I told him there was no way Bert was going to babysit a corpse while waiting for the RCMP to show up, besides it would only be a few hours before a Grizzly showed up for dinner and Bert was deathly afraid of Grizzlies, he would just leave the hunter to be eaten and what would that accomplish. My boss agreed an told me to load him on the back of his truck and take him to the police shack in Fort St John and see what they wanted to do with him and then to drive to the Dawson Airport and wait for some hunters flying in late tonight.

I loaded the dead hunter on the back of my boss’s one ton flat deck and laced him down so that he didn’t bounce out on the dirt road. I drove him to town, checking my mirror occasionally to be sure I still had my passenger. I dropped him off at the cop shack and left for the Dawson Airport to get some new hunters, thinking I was done with the dead hunter.

We finished the hunting season and I got some nice tips and a pair of German binoculars from an appreciative hunter. I went home to start preparing for trapping season and cutting firewood.

I received a call from the cop shop telling me I needed to bury the hunter in the community graveyard, because no one back in the states was claiming the body. This was about the time that Harold Wypert died and Hilda the Basque passed away. Harold was huge, he weighed close to 500 pounds and Hilda probably didn’t weigh 100 pounds so they were certainly a contrasting pair and now they were going to be planted with the hunter that no one wanted.

Harold’s funeral was on Thursday and Hida’s was on Friday. I met the backhoe man before the funeral and showed him where to dig Harold’s grave. I had the hunter’s body in the back of my pickup and planned on asking the backhoe man to dig an extra grave since I had been paid by the province for a plot and the bill for digging the grave.

Now Harold was a Mormon and that is a special consideration to the events that followed. It only took the backhoe about twenty minutes to dig the grave, so the backhoe man and I waited about a half hour for the funeral procession to show up. A five ton truck seemed to be leading the procession and I thought that was a little odd, because there was no hearse. The five ton truck had a septic tank on the back and it pulled up right into our little cemetery right next to the grave. Harold’s grown son and daughter came over and explained that Harold’s grave wasn’t big enough.

I asked why not, because that was what he had paid for: they pointed at the septic tank and said that Harold was in the Septic tank. At first I thought Harold had died in the septic tank, but no not at all, they just don’t make a casket big enough for people like Harold. Now I don’t have a lot of experience with septic tanks, but the ones Ive seen have a wall in the middle and I couldn’t help but wonder how Harold had been stuffed into the tank.

I asked about what we were supposed to do about the fact that Harold’s family plot only had two feet left and he was obviously going to need at least four feet to have enough room for the septic tank and that put him into the grave site for Hilda slated for tomorrow.

His relatives got in my face and told me that it was my problem, that Harold was going to be buried in the plot he had paid for, a long time ago. I asked them why they didn’t cremate him and plant the urn and there would have been lots of room. They explained they were Mormons and they didn’t want to show up on judgement day incinerated. I was getting a little aggravated at this point and said, “You don’t want to show up in an urn, but it’s okay to arrive in a septic tank”, I walked away at that point, it was obvious the family wasn’t going to be of much help. Suddenly, I had an epiphany, I asked the backhoe man to dig the grave four feet wide and eleven foot deep. He said it would cost extra. I knew better than to ask the family to pay the extra cost at this point, so I told him I’d make up the difference.

I explained to the family, Harold owns the funeral plot right down to the center of the earth, so I was just going to bury him a little deeper and let him lease a little of Hilda’s plot down below the normal depth, since most residents don’t worry over the ground beneath their grave sites. Harold’s family thought it was a pretty good idea when I explained that he would be beneath the frost line and would be quite comfy in his Septic tank until judgement day. When the backhoe had finished, the wind was blowing and it was starting to snow. The mourners were wanting to get this debacle over with and I was more than ready to get it over with.

The five ton truck with the septic tank started his engine and tried to lift the septic tank with his boom, but his boom didn’t have the power to lift the tank and Harold at the same time. I told the family we were going to need to lift Harold out and place him on the ground so that they could put the tank in the ground and then put Harold back in the tank. The family told me in no uncertain terms that they would have me arrested if I tried such monkey business; I have never been arrested, so the thought of incarceration didn’t appeal to me.

It was now getting dark and the back hoe man was expecting to get paid for his time. I went to the Community Hall and called one of my customers that had a huge boom truck and asked him if he could help me out. He said his truck doesn’t move unless it’s a hundred dollars an hour from the time he turns the key. I told him to get down to the grave yard as quick as he could.

My customer showed up in his truck and lifted Harold and his cement casket off the truck and placed him in his new home effortlessly. I was now going to be out approximately $500 dollars for Harold’s casket to be planted and Hilda’s grave site wasn’t going to be the most tidy grave we ever had dug at the cemetery. Harold’s family and friends left once Harold was situated in his new double wide, so I put my money saving scheme into action.

Once the tank was covered up with a layer of dirt, I backed my truck up towards the grave. The backhoe man was supposed to let me know when I was close to the grave so that we could lower lower the hunter into the upper portion of Harold’s grave, since it wasn’t really being used.

Now those of you from the Northern climates know that plywood on a frosty steel truck bed will slide pretty good. The back hoe man waited to signal me to stop until the last second and when he raised his hand high and fast, I hit the brakes hard at the thought of backing right into the grave. The plywood economy model casket provided by the Province of British Columbia slid out of the truck, into the grave and broke all apart. As I looked down into the grave at the hunter dressed in his best hunting clothes and the coffin now in six different pieces, I was wondering if this situation could get much worse. I asked the backhoe man if he would go down in the hole and help me try to arrange the man and his coffin and he told me he didn’t touch dead people or even get close to them, but he would hold a light for me.

I dropped down into the hole while the back hoe man shined a flash light from up above. It’s no wonder the coffin came apart, it was made with quarter inch plywood and one inch finishing nails without glue and not that many nails. I pushed the hunter and the lumber to the far side of Harold’s grave and the back hoe man buried the hunter and left half of the grave open for Hilda in the morning.

I drove away and did some cowboy accounting for spending a day as the Community Organizer. After being reimbursed by the state for the hunter’s grave and paying my customer for the crane truck, I figured the day was only going to cost me three hundred dollars, not too bad for working all day. I found my self wondering about the possibility of the snow turning to rain in the middle of the night and washing away all the loose dirt over the hunter into Hilda’s grave and how shocked her family would be to find her sleeping next to a stranger without a casket for eternity.

The temperature stayed cold enough to snow the rest of the night and Hilda’s burial went well without incident, thank goodness for small miracles and small people. It all happened over 30 years ago and no one has complained about the crowded conditions, so I guess I made out pretty well to only lose $300 on the deal by cutting corners.

I didn’t run for Community Organizer during the next election cycle and I haven’t run for political office since those days of youthful glory. I will be the first to tell you that Community Service isn’t all that easy and being a Community Organizer is a difficult job, but it sure as Hell didn’t qualify me to be the president of the United States. I was elected to the position and that is a little more prestigious than just appointing yourself as the Community Organizer. It’s true no one ran against me, but that is beside the point. I was a bona fide elected official of the community.

Communities are fairly small groups, our community, while encompassing a fairly large area of about a thirty mile circle only included about 400 hundred people. Managing a group like this doesn’t prepare you to conduct international negotiations involving millions of people; actually, treating enemies and potential enemies like friends and neighbors who live a few miles away can be disastrous.

In the last week, here in America we had something happen that is remarkable in American history and the history of Community Organizers. A newly elected governor in Wisconsin tried to implement a law that would impose the fiscal changes that would save his state from bankruptcy and our president mounted an offensive against the Governor. This is the same president who has been trained in the affairs of Community Organizing. Although he has ample support financially from George Soros and does not need to back up his ideas with his own money, he must realize the importance of the community and its sovereignty, a community resents foreign influence in its internal affairs. In this case, the community is the state of Wisconsin, who elected Governor Walker on the platform of stopping the inevitable collapse of Wisconsin’s state economy. The president claimed that the Governor’s actions represented union busting and cried out havoc and let loose the thugs and dregs of the union movement on the Wisconsin State House in Madison. Using his group Organizing for America, his main force in coordinating his election in 2008 and its ample supply of cash provided by George Soros and the Democratic National Committee, the president bussed in tens of thousands of thug types to try and intimidate the Governor with Egyptian and Tunisian type shows of force. Teachers left their classrooms and marched their students down to the demonstration risking possible criminal charges and flaunting school procedures in the passion far their cause, which mainly consists of paying a percentage of their health and retirement benefit packages and giving up collective bargaining for everything, but wages.

To his credit, Governor Walker was not intimidated, while the teachers and public employees, with the support of President Obama, demonstrated their greed and insensitivity to the plight of the rest of the people in Wisconsin who are going broke while their state teeters above the abyss of economic collapse and once again our president has confirmed the naivete of a Community Organizer when it comes to matters of the economy and of the lunacy of Socialist monetary theory.

Balancing the community budget was something I managed to do by reaching into my own pocket to pay for the shortfall, President Obama and his greedy army of Lesser Elites feel they have the right to reach into our pockets to maintain the lifestyle of an entitled group of Elites, the fact that the rest of the country is broke and scared is not their concern.

President Obama sets examples by taking a Naval fleet with him to India and by telling us we might not be able to take our vacations while his family skis in Vail, of course they are Elites and this is to be expected. The Democratic lawmakers in Wisconsin flee the state to avoid responsibility and while shirking their duty and this is considered normal in this world of Third World Politics that we are being asked to adopt; after all, the poisoned apple of Obama sycophancy is right there in front of you, all you need to do is sell out your principles and get on the Obama Freight Train to economic insolvency to become an Obama Lesser Elite and live in comparative luxury while the rest of America suffers.

Both Obama and I know elections have consequences; the difference is, I was willing to cover my foul ups and try to limit the damage; Obama is just relegating responsibility to future generations while he tries to Redistribute Wealth from those who actually work for a living to those who just have a job or don’t work. What is his ultimate goal? Is it to help the down trodden or consolidate power and promote himself and his dubious ideas of an open Socialist society.

While Obama views Walkers attempts at financial responsibility as an “assault on unions” he unleashes an assault on Governor Walker. Walker has been restrained in his reactions to the assaults on his modest proposals to restore Wisconsin’s prosperity, considering the $3.6 billion dollar short fall that Wisconsin faces. Obama would consider that to be insignificant, especially compared to the plight of his precious public service unions who are his main voting support; even though George Soros has lots of money he can only vote once. Obama also has the advantage of being able to print more money, an option that Governor Walker doesn’t have.

In a few weeks, there will be a line up of states that will need to cut back on the elitist lifestyles of public service employees to avoid state bankruptcy and Obama’s Community Organizing skills will be tested. The fact that he is willing to use his own thugs to fight legally elected state governments and their laws is stepping into the Rubicon and may be setting up legal challenges in the near future on whether the president should be fighting state governments when their are so many important matters on an international level taking place around the world.