WARNING: Believing that the First Amendment gives you the legal right to express your opinion may be hazardous to your career.
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Of course, that refers only to Congress. It says nothing about employers–and especially those self-appointed pseudo-gods who claim to be the personification of virtue and infallibility.
If you doubt it, just ask Johnny Cook, who until recently worked as a bus driver for the Haralson County Middle School in Georgia.
In late May, a sixth-grade student boarding Cook’s school bus said he was still hungry. Cook asked why, and the student said he hadn’t been given any lunch.
The reason: He had been forty cents short for buying a reduced lunch. So he hadn’t been given anything, not even the peanut butter offered to everyone else.
Furious, Cook vented his spleen on his Facebook page on May 21:
“This child is already on reduced lunch [program] and we can’t let him eat. Are you kidding me? I’m certian there was leftover food thrown away today.
“But kids were turned away because they didn’t have .40 on there account. As a tax payer I would much rather feed a child than throw it away. I would rather feed a child than to give food stamps to a crack head.”
Just two days later, Cook was fired over that post.
Johnny Cook and friends
The “official reason,” as given by Superintendent Brett Stanton, was that Cook had violated the school’s social media policy by daring to express his opinion publicly.
The policy states:
“Students who post or contribute any comment or content on social networking sites that cause a substantial disruption to the instructional environment are subject to disciplinary procedures.
“Employees who post or contribute any comment or content on social networking sites that causes a substantial disruption to the instructional environment are subject to disciplinary procedures up and including termination.”
This is similar to the policies–and atmosphere–of the Joseph McCarthy “smear and fear” era of the 1950s. You didn’t have to actually be proven an actual Communist, or even a Communist sympathizer.
All that was neeeded to condemn you to permanent unemployment was to become “controversial.” That way, the employer didn’t have to actually prove the employee’s unfitness.
The Almighty Employer need only declare: “Your usefulness to me is over.”
Consider the statement offered by Superintendent Stanton: “I can assure you it did not happen,” he told the CBS affiliate in Atlanta.
And how could he be so certain? Because, said Stanton, he had thoroughly investigated the incident.
“The video surveillance footage clearly shows that the student never went through the lunch lines at the county middle school,” Stanton said.
Therefore, Stanton said, the boy couldn’t have been offered the bagged lunch for students in his situation.
When asked if someone should have noticed the boy wasn’t eating lunch, he had a ready excuse for that: “When you have almost 1,000 students, it’s very difficult to notice.”
Stanton wouldn’t discuss Cook’s termination because it’s a personnel matter, but did say the school district has a strict Facebook policy.
CBS Atlanta contacted the sixth-grader’s family–who backed up Cook’s story.
Cook, who is married and the father of two kids, told CBS Atlanta that he felt in his “heart of hearts the kid was telling the truth.”
A petition has been posted to Change.org demanding that Cook be reinstated. It has so far gained more than 10,000 signatures.
Nor is Cook the only victim of employers who have no regard for the First Amendment.
Ashley Warden, a waitress at an Oklahoma City Chili’s insulted “stupid cops” on her Facebook page. In 2012, her potty-training toddler pulled down his pants in his grandmother’s front yard–and a passing officer gave Warden a public urination ticket for $2,500.
Warden was quickly fired. In an official statement, Chilli’s gave this excuse:
“With the changing world of digital and social media, Chili’s has Social Media Guidelines in place, asking our team members to always be respectful of our guests and to use proper judgement when discussing actions in the work place. After looking into the matter, we have taken action to prevent this from happening again.”
Put more honestly: “We have taken action to prevent” other employees from daring to exercise their own First Amendment rights.
Employers need to be legally forced to show as much respect for the free speech rights of Americans as Congress is required to.
Until this happens, the workplace will continue to resemble George Orwell’s vision of 1984–a world where anyone can become a “non-person” for the most trivial of reasons.
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JFK: FIFTY YEARS AFTER DALLAS: PART ONE (OF TEN)
In Bureaucracy, History, Politics, Social commentary on August 15, 2013 at 11:16 amNovember 22, 2013, will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
It’s one of those infamous dates that its eyewitnesses will never forget–in a class with
Some have called the Kennedy adminsitration a golden era in American history.
A time when touch football, lively White House parties, stimulus to the arts and the antics of the President’s children became national obsessions.
Others have called the Kennedy Presidency a monument to the unchecked power of wealth and ambition. An administration staffed by young novices playing at statesmen, riddled with nepotism, and whose legacy includes the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam war and the world’s first nuclear confrontation.
While Americans continue to disagree about the legacy of JFK, there is no disagreement that his Presidency came to a sudden and shocking end just two years, ten months and two days after it had all begun.
The opening days of the Kennedy Presidency raised hopes for a dramatic change in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.
But detente was not possible then. The Russians had not yet experienced their coming agricultural problems and the setback in Cuba during the Missile Crisis. And the United States had not suffered reversals in Vietnam.
Kennedy’s first brush with international Communism came on April 17, 1961, with the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. This operation had been planned and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency during the final months of the Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
About 1,400 Cuban exiles were to be landed on the island to overthrow the Communist government of Fidel Castro. They were supposed to head into the mountains–as Castro himself had done against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1956–and raise the cry of revolution.
The U.S. Navy would supply transport after an American air strike had knocked out the Cuban air force. But the airstrike failed and Kennedy, under the pressure of world opinion, called off a second try.
Even so, the invasion went ahead. When the invaders surged onto the beaches, they found Castro’s army waiting for them. Many of the invaders were killed on the spot. Others were captured–to be ransomed by the United States in December, 1962, in return for medical supplies.
It was a major public relations setback for the newly-installed Kennedy administration, which has raised hopes for a change in American-Soviet relations.
Kennedy, trying to abort widespread criticism, publicly took the blame for the setback: “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan. Further statements, detailed discussions, are not to conceal responsibility because I’m the responsible officer of the Government.”
The Bay of Pigs convinced Kennedy that he had been misled by the CIA and the Joint Chieifs of Staff. Out of this came his decision that, from now on, he would rely more heavily on the counsel of his brother, Robert, whom he had installed as Attorney General.
Another consequence of the failed Cuban invasion: It convinced Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev that Kennedy was weak.
Khrushchev told an associate that he could understand if Kennedy had not decided to invade Cuba. But once he did, Kennedy should have gone all the way and wiped out Castro.
Khrushchev attributed this to Kennedy’s youth, inexperience and timidity–and believed he could bully the President.
On June 4, 1961, Kennedy met with Khrushchev in Vienna to discuss world tensions. Khrushchev threatened to go to nuclear war over the American presence in West Berlin–the dividing line between Western Europe, protected by the United States, and Eastern Europe, controlled by the Soviet Union.
Kennedy, who prized rationality above all else, was shaken by Knhrushchev’s unexpected rage. Emerging from the conference, he told an associate: “It’s going to be a cold winter.”
Meanwhile, East Berliners felt the door was about to slam on their access to West Berlin, and a flood of 3,000 refugees daily poured into West Germany.
Khrushchev was clearly embarrassed at this clear showing of the unpopularity of the Communist regime. In August, he orderd that a concrete wall–backed up by barbed wire, searchlights and armed guards–be erected to seal off East Berlin.
That same year, when tensions mounted and a Soviet invasion of West Berlin seemed likely, Kennedy sent additional troops to the city in a massive demonstration of American will.
Two years later, in June, 1963, during a 10-day tour of Europe, Kennedy visited Berlin to deliver his “I am a Berlinner” speech to a frenzied crowd of thousands.
JFK adddresses crowds at the Berlin Wall
Standing within gunshot of the Berlin wall, he lashed out at the Soviet Union and praised the citizens of West Berlin for being “on the front lines of freedom” for more than 20 years.
“All free men, wherever they may live,” said Kennedy, “are citizens of Berlin. And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ‘Ich ben ein Berlinner.'”
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