NO SOUP TO GO FOR YOU!

My Queen to be wanted me to make some decree against Campbell new soup product, "Soup At Hand." Basically a microwavable version of it's normal soup that's in a cup designed to fit in your Ford Explorer's beverage holder. (Stay tuned for my decrees on Ford Explorers and SUVs in general) My knee jerk reaction was that she was against it due to it's egregious waste of materials in it's packaging. I'm down with that. Upon further discussion I found out that she was against it because of it's extreme convenience.

I thought a lot about this. I'm a product of a culture that promises everyone a "life of leisure" via technology. I love technology yet here was my queen telling me to ban some of it. My worry is if something like this would be banned, where would it stop? Would I have to ban frozen chicken pot pies or my beloved pop tarts? One could easily argue that the car the soup is meant to be consumed in was a convenience that should be banned. Unfortunately I'm not sure many of us can live a life where we have a nice hearty home cooked breakfast every morning and walk on over to work.

My gut feeling is that the Soup To Go is a chunky sirloin symptom of a larger social sickness that needs to be addressed.

Why are we so hell bent on convenience anyway? No one prefers the Soup To Go over a home made bowl of hearty soup. I know why we do it. Because we work too god damn much. It used to be that the adults in the family unit where segmented up between earning money and running the household. I'm not going to go into the fairness of this but it seems to be a good business model. I liken it to a small Korean restaurant I used to go to where the wife ran the front of the house and the husband cooked. Now, however we've got a situation where no one wants to cook and everyone wants to work the front of the house so the Korean restaurant has to get microwavable Bulgogi for it's customers.

So our economy seems to be based on the fact that each family is going to have two incomes... and get this, ones that require more than 40 hours a week of work. So add a commute of 1-2 hours a day to a 10 hour day and we now are spending half our day trying to get money. If we're expected to get 8 hours of sleep that gives us 4 hours to eat, bathe, poop and form relationships with other humans. How the fuck did we let this happen? As KING I SHALL NO LONGER STAND IT!

My gut feeling is we don't even need it. How much time does anyone actually spend working during the day anyway? I bet we could get the same amount of work done in 6 hours a day with a half hour for lunch and another half hour for breaks. SO, I decree the work day will no longer be 8 hours, but instead will be 5 hours not including break/lunch time. This will be awesome on so many levels. When you work it will have to count. You'll save money not eating out so much or buying Soup To Go. Unemployed people will gain employment to pick up the slack on anything that needs to happen that can't get done during the 5 work hours. I'm sure this can work... I even think a far away land known as Germany may even be doing something like this and they seem fine. This may cause my nation to not be one of the super powers, but I don't care. Look at Italy. Once they were an empire and now they just make movies about the bitter-sweet nature of life and ridiculously overpowered sports cars but what ever. They killed the last guy who tried to pass some laws giving employers stronger rights to fire employees. That's how little they want to work! We just need to learn to appreciate the bitter sweet nature of life and rambling, slow paced, go nowhere moves about it!

So things might get a little crazy for a while, but with my decrees limiting population growth and refusing to import goods from countries who engage in slave labor it'll all work out. I haven't worked out he finer points, but I think that a focus on living life rather than GNP may end up working out for us.

P.S. The Queen makes a kick ass soup.