This has been an interesting week from a conscience point of view. The question has been, do you have a moral obligation to stand up for your beliefs… No matter the consequence.
This question becomes all the more interesting from a blog point of view. Now you can stand up for who you are in a very public way. For the most part, no one is reading your blog. But I suspect, if you prattle on long enough, sooner or later, someone is going to get word of what you are doing and word will spread.
As a business owner, my opinions effect other people. In a capitalistic society, it is quite easy to tighten the screws on anyone with whom you don’t agree. You can not work with them, you can publicly denounce them, you can probably coerce existing clients to no longer work with them. It is not uncommon for a business to be killed because someone takes a disliking to you. That makes things risky for all those employed at your business. In effect, I’m making things riskier for our team by writing a blog such as this.
As a very small business man, I’m at even greater risk because it would be very easy for other businesses or government forces to make things brutally painful for me and my business. The best strategy for me (and really for any business) is to “go along to get along”.
After giving this topic a great deal of thought, this is what I’ve concluded: Every person, one way or another, dies for their beliefs. The day you die, is the day everyone looks back on your life and determines what it was you lived for. Many people die for nothing at all. They had no beliefs. The greatest tragedy of my life would be for me to die with no one knowing what I believed in. And so, much to the potential discomfort of some, I will press on. The consideration of whether to quiet my writings, to tone down my positions, has made me more determined than ever. Unabashedly, I will stand taller, talk louder. I will let everyone know who I am.
I will go to my grave fighting for the common man.
I refuse to sit by as people in power flagrantly exploit and manipulate the common man. Today I have little power. Today I am able to do little more than write this blog. But I do what I can. So I write. It may be the beginning of my corporate demise. I may be cut out of the business world for being a small cyst of incongruity in the capitalist body. But I refuse to go away. I will not be the Invisible Man.
The common man lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. This is what I look to change. What’s more, I look to change it from the inside. I look to change the face of corporate America as a driving force of corporate America.
Today, I am one man creating an itinerary for an odyssey that tomorrow many will follow.
As you read this today, you are reading the beginnings of a man who is finding his voice. It is a voice that will one day cause more tension than most will like. But tension is the driving force for change.
This is the beginning of the New Capitalism.