Fascism in America

I've written about it before here, but a friend lost her job because of blogging is really unbelievable.

This is not the first time this has happened. See here, in SF a teacher was fired for being a gay blogger.

This, to me, is an outrage. There are so many levels at which this is wrong, I don't know where to begin.

A) Number 1) No one will be affected by these blog entries...I mean, honestly, will an employee publishing their thoughts ever seriously affect the firm? I think not. This is not a jab at Alice, who obviously gets a lot of readers judging by the number of comments, but let's be honest, this will not hurt business. Plus, it's a freaking grant organization who doesn't even have clients - am I right?

B) Number 2) let's presume a lot of people DID read the blog and it somehow affected someone in a weird way, brought down morale or could cost them business conceivably...get a freaking life and have a freaking sense of humor about yourself, for chrissake. The first fucking sign of fascism, to me, is humorlessness...if you can't laugh at yourself or what you're doing, well, let's put them in forced labor camps until they learn how to laugh at themselves. Honestly.

I remember getting in trouble at my first job for a script...I was trying to get these clowns in my office to be in a film and had scripts circulating around the office. Somehow, a copy fell into a delivery box of documents and a completely unimportant terd client got the box and made a joke to our president that he hoped that he wasn't in the Christmas Video....of course, a bunch of people (my bosses at the time) got up in arms and were concerned whether we made fun of clients in the script and so on so forth - what a bunch of douche-bags. The next year we weren't able to make a Christmas Video...except we did it anyway.

C) Number 3) Getting your feelings hurt is not sufficient reason to fire someone. Getting your feelings hurt is legitimate...and if one is hurt by something someone said or published on a blog or email or whatever, it's legit. To fire someone, however, for such an offense is a juvenile and frankly, an abuse of what I call, phony power. Basic conflict management, which I did in middle school teaches you to be honest and say, "look, this hurt me, because of this and this and it makes me sad that you think of me that way." Yeah, it's a little gay, but that's the way to resolve this kind of thing. Then, maybe Alice feels legitimately bad for hurting someone's feelings and sees a reason to take down something hurtful. But no, the feelings are hurt, I'm sensitive, and I'm firing this person...it's like even if the Palestinians have a legitimate complaint, it doesn't justify suicide bombings. Yeah, her boss is a corporate terrorist.

D) Number 4) THIS IS FUCKING AMERICA. We're supposed to be able to think and say and feel whatever the fuck we want...but I guess some people think in only applies to things they like to hear. Sure, we can't force employers to hire certain people...and from their perspective, they can say, why should we hire someone who makes fun of us and doesn't appreciate the job we have given them, and blah fucking blah. I say, well, sack up and respond with dialogue and with reason and have an ongoing discussion.

Anyways, I could go on, but I've been warned long blog entries are annoying. This is scary and I commend Alice for having the balls to throw their $650 in their face and leave her blog the way it is. It's called courage and a little of it goes a long way.