I've always loved exploring. Even when I was a kid, the thrill of running down an old school hallway to see something I had never seen before was strong enough to get me in trouble many times. To this day, I still peak around roped-off corners in ornate buildings to see what lies beyond the walls the average, non-badged human gets to enjoy.
Fortunately for my trespassing record, I've taken to traveling for most of my adult life to feed my hunger for adventure.
There's something intriguing about walking out into the unknown, connecting with new people, and opening up your world to the unexpected. Since 2020, my family of seven has hit the road several times to see how many state magnets we can pop on to our steel map of the United States. If you didn't guess it, we homeschool, and our last five-week long road trip added another 18 states to our map! It was hard work with 5 kids under 12, but the perspective we gained from taking in so many landscapes and macro cultures in a short period of time was absolutely priceless. If someone was to ask me to name three things I learned from our last road trip, I'd quickly say the world isn't quite as bad as the media makes it out to be, big cities are amazing and still have plenty of sweet people in them, and there's all kinds of adventures just waiting to be written in your book of life; just don't pre-fill all of your pages with rigid forecasts.
If the phrase "five-week long road trip" caught your attention, it could be because the average American only receives a whopping 11 days of paid vacation a year.(2) It's not normal to have five weeks off, and we weren't intending on taking such a long road trip, but I was fired three days before our planned departure and so our strict schedule opened up to a whole new world of possibilities. The sudden change in employment was an incredible shock to us. When most professional workplaces take months of paperwork to terminate an employee, I was given three business days. The thought may have entered your mind, "Wow, he must have done something egregious to have been fired so suddenly," except I had no complaints in my five-year record at this company. Why then was I terminated so suddenly? I was "separated" from the company because I didn't complete my Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training course in the allotted time. As with any short explanation of a complicated event, it's very common to assume the narrator is biased and may lean heavily towards one side in an attempt to justify his/her stance, and I would agree. We all know marriages don't end from petty issues like a daily discovery of a lifted toilet seat or finding the microwave caked in chili; likewise, this separation was extremely drastic in the professional engineering world.
The Wizard Behind Diversity.
It began in 2022 with our Equal Opportunity Employment (EOE) training course going through a major overhaul. For two annual qualification cycles I wasn't able to complete the course in good conscience and so these items posted as 'expired' on my training list. After the first expired item, not one Lead or Manager asked about it. It had gone under the radar, and I had let it be. But in 2023, the multiple pings from my Team Lead led me to call Human Resources (HR) and request accommodation to attest to the company material without feeling forced to agree to some of the offensive content. My request for accommodation took months to address, included key players in Legal, and clearly revealed influence from powers above the Vice President (VP) of Human Resources. VPs knew me by name and discussed how I was "red" on my EOE qualification training course.
In the EOE training course, all employees were required to click on a "correct" response to scenarios of sexual harassment for transgender men and women. To be more specific, for us to renew our EOE training qualifications (qualifications required to work on government contracts), we had to check yes or no to several questions on transgenderism. I was coerced to agree that "it could be considered sexual harassment" for a woman to say to a transgender man that she was "uncomfortable" with him going into her multi-stall restroom. In a short period of time, I was challenged to either accept a new cultural standard to keep my job or be terminated for venerating the moral values infused deep in my soul. This was extremely difficult for me because these values were shaped by decades of life lessons, influenced by being a father of three precious girls, and were solidified by historical, religious texts dating between 2000 and 4000 years old, not from morals fabricated in one mere generation. Many of these core values were not solely MY values but were inherited from what I believe to be a kingdom and government far greater than anything here on earth.
The shift in our company's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity (DEI) policies was so stark every employee in our branch couldn't help but notice. In 2021 our company's Shareholders started admiring corporate equality indices governed by organizations like the Human Rights Campaign(3), policies similar to JEDI(4) from B Lab Global, and the "prestigious" awards they won from employer recognition programs at Top Workplaces (Energage, LLC).(5) Even as I write this, my previous employer has an open position posted on LinkedIn for a "DEI Program Coordinator" where one of the listed responsibilities is to provide support to the company's DEI Advisory Council.(6) In a period of less than two years, our EOE training course changed dramatically. Our training was saturated with what felt to be more than 50% of the harassment scenarios entertaining homosexual and transgender topics. At first, you could hear the entire floor's frustration with the scenarios. They were so poorly written it took several attempts to figure out what the company wanted us to select to move on to the next slide. Laughter filled the halls from our training, so eccentric, it was completely outside our culture. In one scenario, a gender-neutral named person was apparently offended by another gender-neutral named person for asking if he (or she?) was "going to put on makeup before the presentation?" Our minds were spinning. How could we know why "he" or "she" was offended by a comment regarding makeup if we were not given meaningful context?
It was too much. All my momentous epiphanies; all my character-building experiences felt like they were being turned upside down. Running ahead to open a door for a woman could now be labeled offensive. The heroic, masculine trait of standing up against bullying was crumbling like a wall hit by a wrecking ball. I was left confused, picking up the bricks, having to create a new edifice inside of me that didn't complement the architecture nearby. Even if I tried to accept this new paradigm, it would stick out in my community like a three-story mansion built in a trailer park. Before 2021, if someone would have come up to me at work and asked me if I was going to wear makeup at the next presentation, I would have laughed and assumed it was a joke. If they continued to ask gender-assaulting questions, frustration would rise, and I would have merely asked them to stop joking about it. Would I call it harassment and report it to my manager? No. I can handle nasty comments. I've been bullied before. Back in my school days, I was taught to confront my peers and dutifully speak up for myself before going to the teacher. If speaking up didn't work and if the teacher didn't do anything, I'd move on to the next person in authority. If no one in supervision stepped up to the plate, and if the bullying continued, then perhaps it was time to sign up for mixed martial arts.
Even so, the tyranny from the alphabet movement continued at work. Things were changing fast and the majority of us were trying to find dry ground; the muddy waters of the new, post-Pandemic culture were rising quickly. Little comments suggesting a disapproval of men in women's boxing began to fade. Attempts to find others around with similar convictions deteriorated. The confusion we were wrestling with was losing its pressure relief valve. You could feel the warmth of diverse opinions growing cold, all the while our company was touting alphabet soup on its internal social platforms, employee emails, and recruiting websites.
Our branch began to charter transgender engineers from other divisions or hire them from larger recruiting pools where there was little accountability with their lifestyles. Colorful characters started stirring up our rhythm. Our conservative body was now trying to figure out how to politely address or deal with these new team players. We didn't want to have pre-conceived judgments, but when someone changes their mind on such a solid attribute as their birth gender, it's difficult not to wonder if there was a serious disorder or traumatic experience from their past. A thousand questions would creep in to our minds. How do you act around them? How do you treat them if their world seems embrittled? Do they have prejudice and are we on thin ice around them? What pronouns can we use? Do we call them by their name even though it wasn't given to them? Do we hold on to our gut feelings formed by raw intuition and truth, or do we deconstruct to align with the more modern, vacillating cultures around us?
It seemed the "glow" of our conservative workforce was dimming. So much so, even the actionless grumblers were duct taping their mouths. The chilling affect was directly connected to a significant piece of our life, …our employment, …our income.
The Profit Pushing Pin.
The whole transgender, DEI, income-crushing odor was familiar to me. It was a scent reminding me of the distant past. My career on the line. My peers shutting down. The connection dwindling with others in my office who were likeminded. Awkward, short eye contacts with those who once swam upstream, now belly up, floating away to the oceans of inclusion. In October of 2021 it was the first verse of the same song I was hearing in 2023. In 2021, groups would meet in hallways encouraging each other to avoid the jab. People would walk around to share the next article they had stumbled upon in the dark web of independent news. We knew most of the acronym media outlets were singing to the same song handed to them by their big pharma sponsors and we wanted to share the irony with others. We all felt like we were in a sequel of The Truman Show. We were trying to sneak away from the cameras to see if there were others out there who had noticed Google throttling our searches or if they had seen web pages disappear before their eyes. Had others experienced YouTube videos with millions of hits garnished in less than a day taken down before their eyes? Did others know the key words that would instigate a Facebook fact-check banner below their post? Did they see when LinkedIn started banning activists of "misinformation" from their services? Our whole network was being controlled. Every station we turned to was glitchy and filled with noise. We couldn't find a clean channel anymore and the world we once watched was vanishing before our eyes. We could feel something was wrong. We just needed to see if there were others out there who felt it too. Nevertheless, when our jobs were on the line the rallies started to dwindle. When the amenity of air travel became a comfort we might lose, our political clusters dismantled. The closer the day approached to the final submission date of our official vaccination status, the quieter the office became.
When the subject of the Holocaust comes up (as it often did during the pandemic), it's a fairly typical response for people to say they would never have joined the Nazi regime to aid in the bussing of Christians, Jews, and the other "rebellious minorities." Now that I've experienced the eerie silence from my peers as I packed up my belongings, I feel more bold to speak on this topic, and I'll admit, saying no takes more strength than we think. It doesn't just happen once or twice as the sun breaks through the clouds and the trial passes like a summer rain. The starvation of our soul is over a longer period than we often realize. The shifts in our society happen gradually enough to give room for compromise and reshape our world view. Slow enough to erode our convictions and sear our hearts towards our neighbor. Even now, barricades are being set up to starve our minds of free thought and ideological intercourse.
For the first time in my entire life, I found myself questioning if the people around me would be able to stand with me if religious groups were labeled extremists and trafficked to "safe camps." If my coworkers couldn't handle the thought of losing their job while in their most comfortable financial season of life, how would they handle a couple years of war on their homeland, famine in their grocery stores, and aggressive policies against ethnicities? Would they have the endurance to go through half a decade of a real battle against their principles and then have the courage to stand up against the masses?
Please don't think I use Holocaust references lightly. I can understand why survivors and their relatives are offended when their stories are used for the sake of winning a petty argument. To be frank, nothing we experienced in 2021 or 2023 even came close to what happened during the Holocaust. Toilet paper shortages? Please. I had a conversation with my barber where he was contemplating taking the jab over missing out on a trip to the Bahamas! Some of my female coworkers wrestled with scenarios like having to choose to suppress their feelings of violation from a man sitting next to them in their restroom so they wouldn't have to sell their fifth rental unit two years early to retirement. Though our fears were real to us at the moment, now, looking back, we can clearly see the absurdity. Americans only scratched the surface with what the German people went through. Does this nullify our offense? Not at all, and I would caution us that we're heading down a dark and sinister path. Recall Gina Carano's Holocaust analogies that had her ousted from Hollywood(7) and ask yourself what comes next after a society is willing to destroy someone's profession over misconceived social media posts. If a society can numb their minds on smaller subjects like gender identity and health care, would they ignore their ideals of religious freedom when their city is on fire? No, we'll never know what we're capable of until we're feeling the heat, and if we were to draw up some graphs to compare our civilization to Germany in 1940, I think we would be utterly shocked on the number of similarities between us and the German people. In case you were in a different social "bubble" during the pandemic, the following comments were repeated multiple times on national news: "We need to mark the unvaccinated and remove them from society;" "The unvaccinated should be restricted from travel and not allowed in public places;" "If you're unvaccinated and you're willing to walk around others, you are an enemy of the public;" and "Report your neighbor to the police if you see them violating the quarantine during the holidays."
In 2021, I was one of the few at my company who felt it was wrong to use the religious exemption to circumvent the Covid vaccine mandate. It didn't seem like a religious issue to me, and I didn't want to bolster the process of a secular company determining if I was "religious" enough while granting me permission to bypass a government-issued mandate. A mandate that was forcing me to inject experimental technology with inadequate clinical data into MY body. I can see the irony now looking back on these two trials I've written about. In 2021, my VP and the Head of Engineering both called me into their private offices, imploring me to fill out the religious exemption, and I denied. It was only because of the Supreme Court's decision in October of 2021 that I was given the "opportunity" to be more "inclusive and diverse" in 2023. Two years after the vaccine mandate, when the transgender bullying came to a peak, a lawyer I knew suggested that I request religious accommodation to make room for a wrongful termination grievance. And so here I was, sitting in front of the same VPs that implored me to sign an exemption in 2021, now denying it to me in 2023. How ironic! And this time there was no threat to human life from my germs! But to push all emotions and satire aside, I don't think my previous employer bats an eye at anyone's religious convictions on gender ideology. I believe they're simply taking the broader path paved with risk analyses and monetarism. Nevertheless, the contrast on how my company handled these two situations couldn't be more clear!
Singing as the Train Goes By.(8)
The rot in our society isn't exclusively in the secular workplace. The shackles of fear and fortune crept into our religious institutions decades ago, and if I was to rotate the limelight and close on a deeper issue, I would shine it on our steeples.
Let's first set the stage of blame by picturing a classic, black & white, Western film. The battle between good and evil is plainly painted between a hero and a villain, the good team & the bad team, one side fighting for life and the other, no respect for it. With this simple analogy, even a small child could answer the question, "If the good guys are off on vacation, will the bad guys win?" It's a fact. A town will see chaos if the side that should be resisting evil is always out to lunch. Our congregations today are full of spectators who love comfort over conviction. They have selected for themselves priests to teach extravagant sermons encouraging deep conversations around their coffee bars, aiding to their piety, while carelessly avoiding culpability. Their Pastors, who may have once joined the race with brave intentions, are now atrophying as an athlete that never competes. Many church leaders have parted their responsibilities in an attempt to salvage any vigor they have left. Unwittingly, they've turned the controls on their Teslas to 'Autopilot' and left their ministries to bounce back and forth between the freeway lines. Their fears have turned their heads towards endless committee meetings and peacekeeping efforts to satisfy their sulky parishioners. Eventually, their fears shape their way of conduct, and like a ship without a sail, a congregation without confrontation can never move upwind.
The year before I was terminated, the majority of our state representatives passed a law where minors were allowed to receive permanent, gender reassigning surgery without parental consent. To this day, if a legal guardian tries to prevent their child from this surgery, the child can run to the state, the state will intervene, pay for housing, and provide the surgery with taxpayer funds.(9) You would think speaking out against this bill would be a no-brainer in the conservative space. Much to our dismay, our church leadership rejected the idea of placing two tables with petitions in our foyer. Our elders stated Sunday mornings were reserved for teaching the Bible, not petitioning. They didn't want "politics getting in the way of the gospel." Still hoping to get as many signatures as possible, I asked if I could set a few tables on our public sidewalk where most of our congregation would walk by. I was denied aid a second time and placed in a position of either honoring my church leadership or utilizing the petitioning rights I have as an American citizen. This was a difficult decision and the lack of time we had to collect signatures was one of our darkest enemies. After seeking counsel, I told the elders the public sidewalk was where their authority ended. This was like heat to a crucible and the impurities in our leadership quickly rose to the surface. After several days of discussion, it became evident that our congregation would never be an effective place to congregate signatures. It was only a few months later when a large group of people who founded the church chose to start a new fellowship. Our family opted in on the exodus, and it's been a wonderful journey I wouldn't trade for the world. Sadly, the fight against the gender reassigning surgery bill, SB5599, fell only 5000 signatures short.(10) Without getting into the weeds with numbers,(11)(12)(13) Washington state's church attendees alone could have gathered the needed signatures and voted their conscience on tax payer funded gender surgery. The religious denominations in our country are horrendously preoccupied and have lost their savor in their communities. Instead of shining on a hill with their beliefs, they duck behind their walls for comfort. The church was formed to be a light to the nations, yet it has lost its luster. It's no wonder the darkness is spreading.
When One Curtain Closes, Another Opens.
More than ever, corporations around the world can be easily personified as villains in a show strikingly similar to the action movies we watched as kids. Scripts with powerful, wealthy characters lusting after control over global mechanics are beginning to parallel with articles found in newspapers and Time magazines. To many Americans, today's CEO's feel more like anti-heroes willing to squash anyone who stands in their way. But just as every villain gets caught in his/her monologue while the hero unties the knot, we're seeing their devices unravel before us while their speeches are recorded for all to download and watch. The sledgehammer of citizen journalism is striking large cracks in the dam of mainstream media. People are noticing the glitches on their screen as live vote tallies plummet, institutions functioning "as usual" without a cognitive commander, and fake news compilations hyping verbatim warnings of "threats to our democracy." Even in the Christian sector, laymen are perceiving a thinning of the firmament between the spiritual and the natural realms taking place before our eyes. Current technologies and global events are making end-time prophecies easier to grasp. Oddities in scripture once shadowed from understanding are now visible from these new angles of modern light.
Yes, we live in fascinating times! Times where hours of slumber can lead to years of regret.
Now is not the time to be quiet, to remain secluded, or accept defeat. We must understand there is an evil darkness shadowing America and it is actively trying to divide us. It wins when we cower in fear. It gains ground when we submit in silence.
So, stand while you have the strength.
Speak up while you have a conscience.
And from one travel aficionado to another, don't let the love of comfort keep you roped off from your next exciting adventure.
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