A Heartfelt Screed ..

Just in case y’all think I believe hyperlinks and information and good intentions are going to magically change the world … they may help to change the world, over time .. but it sure as shooting ain’t gonna be magic.

I ran across this (excerpt below) whilst researching the recent story that the blogger Armando (who posted regularly at the dailyKos blog) had been outed as a corporate attorney by trolls, and the subsequent spate of people diving for cover, or noting that more and more frequently now corporations and recruiters use Google to make sure that some candidate or other has never uttered a word in vain against "the system" (for example).

The longish excerpt offers a pantload of examples of why the desire to control and have people fit in is alive and well, and raging on into the future. It is in response to the emerging realization that people are posting much about themselves on social web spaces like Myspace and Facebook

What price freedom, principles and basic human dignity .. such as the right to an opinion of one’s , and the freedom of self-expression in a context essentially totally removed from a workplace.  Do employers "own" you ?  Always a good question to ask yourself.

Melanie Deitch, director of marketing at Facebook, agreed, saying students should take advantage of the site’s privacy settings and should be smart about what they post.

But it is not clear whether many students are following the advice. "I think students have the view that Facebook is their space and that the adult world doesn’t know about it," said Mark W. Smith, assistant vice chancellor and director of the career center at Washington University in St. Louis. "But the adult world is starting to come in."

Personally speaking, the price I’ve paid has been high.  Having paid it, I will never let someone else own my soul … and I have no compunctions about not hiding myself behind a pseudonym.

Thanks to the blog driftglass. Here’s the full piece, titled "Welcome to the Jungle".  And please remember, Pleasantville may be just around the corner .. next stop light, turn left, keep driving.

        ……………

At a gig I worked some years ago at a fairly profitable shop, the Big Squeeze came shortly after were we acquired by a cabal of white, Christian good-‘ol-boys from People’s Republic of Texas.

Even though the bottom line was sound, there immediately came a round of purges and job “reclassifications” that were very clearly calibrated to get rid of as many women and minorities as possible, and make sure all the survivors had to effectively double their workload without complaint or compensation, or be sacked.

In case you’ve spent the days of your life in an “Altered States” isolation tank – and therefore have also spent you nights gamboling through your local zoo, hunting gazelle – even in this Year of our Lord 2006, there are still a staggering number of men – mostly men – in senior management who believe that their employees are their property, to be berated, groped, elevated and disposed of at a whim.

Who believe in their shabby break-room-after-hours rights of “droit du seigneur” and “jus primae noctis” as fiercely as any medieval Lord.

Add in that smugly-grinning-pervert-Jim Bakker-ish dogma of White Male Fundamentalist Privilege and the results are especially revolting.

And ain’t it just great that these Anointed Ones run the country now!

Anyway, there was a pretty clear line of demarcation when it came to the reaction of us worker bees. Needless to say everyone was pissed and dismayed and sickened that this particular disease had infected our relatively-happy little isle, but for those of who had stocked up a certain number of professional years, this came as no big surprise; for those who had not, it shocked the Hell out of them.

“B-b-but they can’t do that! You can’t just fire someone for no reason at all!”

Oh little darlin’, how it saddened me to see you reach that moment of bitter realization about how the Real World really works.

To see something charming and tender die in your eyes when you were forced to confront the fact that, often, the Bad Guys win, and all of your eloquence, logic and undeniable rightness makes as righteous a sword-and-shield combo when pitted against pinstrip Neanderthals with power as an icicle and a wad of Kleenex in a blast furnace.

But the trick is not to abandon your heart. Don’t turn your back on your ideals.

No, quite the opposite: realize that your ideals are not laws of physics that need no cops and courts because they cannot be broken (“Sir please put down the Perpetual Motion machine and step away from the Laws of Thermodynamics!”), or some endowment from God that can’t be smacked right out of your hands and regifted into the corporate shredder by thugs with money and clout.

Instead they are values and principles that are constantly under siege by people who believe that money or skin color or political party or faith renders them above such petty considerations.

It is a blessing to have been taught that tolerance, respect, civil rights and privacy are basic virtues, but you was robbed, darlin’, if you were told that you would enjoy these things forever at no cost and without struggle.

The world is full of busy men with money and power working every day to strip-mine those values off the face of the Earth and replace them with a tidy, Flag-and-Bible-driven Corporate Christian state free of any vestigial traces of genuine democracy.

And oh my yes, they will fuck with you. For their own reasons or for no reason at all, your life will be tampered with, prodded and scarred by people who are running an agenda that is loathsome to you, and antithetical to every value your parents taught you to adore.

And sometimes they win. Outright. And no cavalry shows up in the third reel to save the fort.

I hate to break it to you kid, but we’re the cavalry.

Just you and me.

And the loons who have traded their Canadian money back for Yankee dollars to donate to the cash-strapped casinos at Yearly Kos. And the Atriots. And the Soccer Brigades who have temporarily taken over Steve and Jen’s place. And the ramblers at Shakepeare’s Sis. And all the rest of the troublemakers, too numerous to mention.

And millions and millions and millions of others.

As a friend used to tell me back when my flesh was more tender than it is now, “Remember, in the end there is no justice. There’s just us.”

The good news is, like it or not, from drowned polar bears to footprints on the Moon, the world really is what we make it. But if we want it to be a safe harbor for tolerance, respect, civil rights and privacy, then we have to hew that shape into our national bedrock and keep dredging the mud out, in spite of fear and failure.

The better news is, most of the hard work has already been done by the generations and legions of patriots and anonymous citizens, veterans and school teachers, working folks, pamphleteers and protesters that preceded us. We’re just the swing shift, kiddo: newbies clocking in on a job that great men and women began long, long ago.

So don’t be afraid to pick whatever tiny corner of the banner you can lift and help the friends of liberty to carry it forward — even just a little — but for goodness sake remember that you’re in a for-real fight in a digital age.

Tags: connectivity, principles, freedom of speech, hyperlinks, power, wirearchy

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