Unfortunately I’m not alone.
I’d actually hoped that the emerging patterns in society were transient anomalies. I’d also hoped that I was seeing things that weren’t there, that I was crazy, that I simply misunderstood or misinterpreted the bits and pieces of information flowing past me.
Oops! Maybe I wasn’t.
For a long time I’ve been noticing things. Small little things about the way people were behaving, trends in social justice, and the way so many people appeared to not only be polarized, but also unwilling to have a discussion with anyone who held different opinions or beliefs.
When I mentioned the things I’d noticed, my friends and family shut me down immediately. Usually they’d tell me that I was wrong and making a bigger thing out of something than it was. Eventually I stopped even trying to talk about what I’d notice and assumed that I was maybe too sensitive.
One of the first things I recall noticing was how differently Men were treated in sexual harassment situations. You could end a man’s career with only the accusation of Sexual Harassment.
Sitting in a sexual harassment training class in the ’90’s I innocently asked if the same rules appleid to women. The Female trainer treated me like I was insane and confidently told me that Women don’t sexually harass men.
When I explained that at barely 18, I’d had a female boss say, “Fuck me or you’re fired,” The sexual harassment trainer called me a trouble maker, a liar, and told me and the class no woman would ever do that.
She denied my actual lived experience, choosing to treat me like I was the aggressor instead of legitimately the victim by her own definition of victimhood. This kind of denial, that Men could be victims of sexual harassment, continues to this day.
For me it’s fascinating how utterly dismissive HR, Upper Management, and society at large are of this phenomenon. Women in my experience don’t sexually harass Men as often, but how would we really know?
Since men are dismissed as aggressors, troublemakers, or crybabies if and when they report it, are they likely to actually report it? Most men will simply think to themselves, “There’s no point in reporting it, that’s a waste of time. So I’ll just have to put up with it until I find a new job.”
Then they go out and find a new job. Over time, some men I suspect begin looking only at those positions where they will be working for other men. From my personal experience, I’ve had a lot more bad women bosses than bad men bosses.
At this point in my life, I’d rather work for a man. I don’t mean that to be misogynistic, it’s simply a statement of fact. Over 40 years of employment, the bad female bosses greatly outnumbered the male ones.
Zero Tolerance policies started showing up in schools, and businesses. These policies referred to sexual harassment in the beginning but rapidly expanded to include almost anything.
Does anyone remember the PopTart incident? Apparently a 5 or 6 year old cleverly chewed around a PopTart until it looked like a gun. The Horror!
The child was promptly removed form the snack area, remanded to the principals office and I recall his parents being called to the school. I don’t recall offhand if the police were also called. This was a direct result of contextless Zero Tolerance policies. He’s a child, it’s not likely he was going to hurt other children with a PopTart.
Policy is policy. Except when it isn’t.
When Zero Tolerance showed up in business, if you made someone uncomfortable or treated someone badly, or unintentionally slighted someone in some way. You’d have the HR department on your neck. Suddenly you couldn’t say someone was flat out wrong. You had to couch it in all kind of sweet language that served no purpose because you didn’t want someone taking you to HR for a reprimand.
After seeing a couple of coworkers toasted because they spoke plainly and honestly, I chose to keep my mouth shut. I’d execute whatever harebrained bullshit plan the boss wanted, even if it ran the project right off a cliff. No-one was interested in what I might have to say, much less my experience. So I’d let ‘em learn for themselves.
I was ahead of the curve in “Quiet Quitting”.
There were exceptions. If a boss was approachable and open to real discussion then I’d happily provide whatever insight or concern I had about a particular project. Trouble was, a large majority of bosses were not interested.
I’ve been honestly amazed at how many times, bosses have had an entire department plow the same ground, stumble over the same rocks, and then blame the employees for the failure.
This confused me, then It occurred to me that most of these people had exactly the same degree, taught from the same books. Then it wasn’t a mystery anymore. What remained a mystery is that so few of them learned from the mistakes.
In retrospect, if you believe you are absolutely right and that the failure is due to incompetent employees, then I suppose introspection wouldn’t be the first thing on your mind.
I must admit, I admire that elitist mindset.
Zero tolerance policies are never enforced equally. There is more zero tolerance for a white Male, or White Female than for a person of color.
Apparently there are levels to Zero
Persons of color typically don’t have to measure up to the Zero Tolerance policy. There are myriad excuses for this, but the most frequent I’ve heard are, “Their Culture is different,” or “You, white person, just misunderstood.”
There was a lady I worked with who went to HR because a supervisor had actively fondled her breasts while they shared an Uber back to the company from an offsite meeting. She was white, blonde, and pretty. The women in HR told her she was over reacting and that she didn’t understand Latin culture.
This lady didn’t come to work after that, her latin husband came in the next day to deliver her resignation, and clean out her office.
It is fortunate that the supervisor who fondled this man’s wife was not on site. I suspect that had he been, we all would have been treated to a cultural lesson in how Latin men deal with such insults.
At the same company, a black woman who wore an excessive amount of very cheap perfume took her supervisor and two other co-workers who shared cubicles next to hers, to HR.
Her contention was that these people were harassing her by asking her to tone down the perfume and not reapply every hour during the day.
This lady could literally be followed through the building by her perfume. The coworkers adjacent to her cube were having full blown allergic reactions. Swelling eyes, throat constrictions, etc. HR after hearing both sides, told her coworkers to take Benadryl. The supervisor was reduced in rank and that was the end of it.
Until the letter from perfume lady’s lawyer arrived. Then the supervisor and her coworkers were fired for harassment. Perfume Lady went out on stress leave and rumor was, she’d been paid off handsomely on the harassment suit.
I learned working for that company, that Zero Tolerance only worked one way. White people had no right to a safe and comfortable working environment and that complaints, even legitimate ones were weighted by the color of a person’s skin.
I mentioned these things to some friends and family and was told that clearly I didn’t have the entire story and that I must be jumping to conclusions.
5 years later, we can see this philosophy, now called equity, permeates government, business, and education, across the nation.
Equity is not Equality.
Equity is a thumb firmly on the scale. Equality is everyone is treated the same regardless of their appearance or social status.
When the Vice President says that FEMA funding will be assigned based on equity and is not challenged. There’s a problem. The White House and FMEA walked back her statement because there was considerable blowback. But I look at this as a test. The day there isn’t substantial blowback is the day that this weird issue of “Equity” will be entrenched.
At that point, folks from the non equity favored groups will be on their own during a disaster and perhaps on a wider scale too. Imagine the fun that can be had with “Equity” taxation.
There may come a day when certain groups will have an additional tax percentage added or subtracted from their tax bill based solely on the color of their skin.
It sounds outlandish today, but I won’t be surprised if someone floats the idea.
When the canary in the coal mine passes out, the workers evacuate the mine.
When a human canary tweets and chirps about things, they’re called ignorant, racist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, nazis. They’re cancelled if they’re in the public eye, they’re mistreated and / or fired if they’re working for a large corporation. Which is in effect being cancelled. These days with corporations demanding access to an employees social media even what is said to your friends can get you fired, regardless of the context in which something was said.
“Hey Jack do you want to go to the trans abortion parade?”
“No thanks Greg, that’s not something I’m interested in. I have plans to go surfing with some buddies anyway.”
UH OH!
The trans HR worker at your company decides that you’re a closet Transphobe and even though you’ve never said anything offensive to anyone at work, you’re a bad person.
The canceling may be subtle. For example an application to move to another department may be “lost” resulting in the offending employee not getting the opportunity.
A .5% raise may simply not happen due to “poor performance scores” Asking the supervisor what was wrong with performance usually results in “I’ll look into it,” but nothing is ever done and nothing is ever conclusive enough one way or another to take action.
After all that Supervisor is a busy person, meetings to go to and luncheons to attend with all the “Right” upper management and all…
An employee can wait it out hoping the HR person goes to another company, but they’ll never regain traction and will always be underpaid until they too move to another company.
This is probably why some people realize a 5 to 10K pay increase just by moving to another company.
Having seen this kind of thing with my own eyes has made me very selective about which companies I apply at. A big red flag is a HR person asking for my social media accounts prior to an interview.
I have no social media accounts. LinkedIn being an exception. (That account, I am so tempted to delete because it’s pointless to me.) I’ve actually had HR people tell me that I must have social media accounts and that I must share them with the company. They simply will not believe that I’m not sharing my life with complete strangers.
The most recent incident resulted in the HR person telling me that starting out with their company by lying wasn’t going to get me an interview. Since I wasn’t lying, when I said, “Okay. Goodbye.” The HR person lost their shit. “You’ll never work for us!” I paused hitting the disconnect button, “Frankly I wouldn’t want to work for a company that starts out calling me a liar. There can never be trust between us. I really don’t do social media and you can spend the rest of the week trying to find a social media account, aside from LinkedIn but you won’t find one because there aren’t any. Again, Goodbye.”
Honestly, I have 4 friends, and 3 family members. We know each other’s phone numbers. We text or call each other. The rest of the planet doesn’t need access to those conversations.
I have something like 50 former coworkers excluding friends and family in my circle on LinkedIn. Not one of them has contacted me about anything in the past 5 years. So really what’s the point?
It’s not just the HR people from companies. The Headhunters do it too. I know I’m not supposed to call them headhunters anymore but I’ve lost track of what their preferred fancy title is. They’re still doing the same thing, they’re trying to increase the head count at a company… Ergo they’re headhunters.
Again, here’s that canary thing.
More and more studies are suggesting that social media may lead to depression, anxiety, and in some cases suicidal ideation. Some of those studies indicate that much of the social media people post may in fact be fictitious to garner upvotes and feelings of external approval. This is interesting because it speaks to some profound insecurity. Why would I worry about approval coming from someone that I’ve never met and probably wouldn’t recognize on the street?
The only approval I want is that of people that I have a real relationship with.
Full disclosure, I did at one time have Facebook, Twitter, and Parler, accounts. Facebook was the first to be deleted, then Twitter, and finally Parler. Today, I’m better off, less angry, or depressed, than I was when I had these accounts.
You see, I fell into the trap of approval clicks. I was disheartened when I posted something and got few if any responses. On Twitter and Parler most of the responses I got were from extremists. With the Twitterati I was castigated for being too conservative and therefore a hate monger. With the Parlerites I was too liberal and Un-American.
I couldn’t win for losing, and so I took my ball and went home.
Even if I still had those social media accounts, simply having a Parler, Gab, or TruthSocial account would immediately exclude me from most HR department hiring pools. The thought would be, “He’s a MAGA Terrorist! We can’t hire someone like him!”
It wouldn’t matter if I’d never posted one single thing. Simply having those accounts would be enough to activate bias against me. My resume and qualifications would never end up on a hiring manager’s desk.
The thing is, if you don’t post “enough,” whatever that is, then you’ve just created an account to meet the HR requirements. That’s not enough, they want to “Get to know you” through your posts.
Canary Time again. Changing the meaning of common words is bad.
When I brought this up to some acquaintances they told me I was out of my mind. Uhh Nope!
In this context “Getting to know you,” Is another euphemism for “Getting to judge you”. That wouldn’t be so bad if they were judging a person on their work, but this is judging the person on their politics, opinions, and beliefs. Not on their ability to actually scrub the corporate toilets.
I’ve thought about just giving them the address to this blog. Who knows, after some of the people got done reading this blog they might realize that human beings may have differing opinions and that doesn’t mean they’re planning some nefarious crime.
Nah, the HR folks would quiver and quake, then have mental breakdowns from having to read. They’d all go out to their safe spaces or go out on stress leave.
When words have no meaning communication is impossible.
This is especially true if descriptors are involved. If Man and Woman aren’t defined, and pronouns are fluid then what exactly are you saying in legal documents? How about medicine?
Imagine being wheeled into an operating room, and just as you’re passing out from the anesthesia hearing the doctor commenting that your genitalia was completely incorrect for a circumcision but no worries, the doctor would fix it all so that the desired outcome was the right one.
How about losing your 20 million dollar inheritance because you now identify as Zer but the great aunt willed the money to her wonderful nephew William?
Legal documents are precisely written to describe exactly what, when, who, and how. If you no longer fit the definition what happens? If Wilimina walks into the attorneys office will ze get zer inheritance?
If a house is defined by its owner as a tent, then the owner calls a mover of tents to strike your tent and move it to another location can there be breach of contract?
This strange redefinition seen today could lead to Zero Racism though. If you said that everyone in America was colored then how could there be racism? Everyone has some color. The only way they couldn’t would be if they were completely transparent.
Murderers could redefine their act as a retroactive abortion. If they were to convince the court of this, would they only face charges of practicing medicine without a license?
Can a trans individual identifying as a birthing individual commit rape against another birthing individual? Or were they just scissoring rubbing one large everted clit against a smaller clit with an inverted passage?
Does the potential offspring from such an event have any legal standing or is the offspring null and void since the rape couldn’t have occurred in the first place?
Something like this might create a whole other set of problems because there are religions who view immaculate conception as a really big deal.
Words matter sometimes
But it seems only when a word may be leveraged for victimhood. The gold standard of this it the forbidden “N” word. This word must never be used in any context because it causes hurt.
It’s hate speech except when it’s not. A person of darker color may call another person of darker color the “N” word. Persons of darker color can use the “N” word in song lyrics broadcast on the airwaves but no-one else may use this word.
If a person of lighter color sings the lyrics of a song containing the forbidden “N” word they may be violating hate speech laws and subject to cancellation, fines, imprisonment, and payment of restitution.
To say Black Lives Matter is virtuous. To say All Lives Matter is racist. For a person of darker color to say White Lives Matter is heresy, that person of darker color is an “Uncle Tom,” a “Hateful bigot,” and should be cancelled immediately.
Saying something hateful like Blue Lives matter is completely Nazi-esq inciting violence and welcoming the police state.