Tag Archives: red-state

Politics

Are You a Liberal Working in a Red State?  Here Are Five Ways to Stay Politically Active and Keep Your Job

2 Comments

Sometimes it’s tough if you are a liberal and committed to a progressive political agenda while working in a red state.

The big question: Will I get fired by my conservative boss if I don’t hide my beliefs and political activities?

Having lived and worked in Oklahoma for most of my life, there have been plenty of times when I found myself navigating between the conservative political climate, the conservative political beliefs of my boss, and the conservative politics of clients.

From that experience, here are some ideas about how to keep your job without compromising your core beliefs:

1. Clearly separate your personal political activities and your business/work activities. You cannot be sloppy, lazy, or casual about expressing your political beliefs.

  •  All social media activity must be clearly separated by different accounts in each platform.
  • Claim your associations  in your profile on each personal account claiming that these are your personal ideas and do not represent your employer or clients.
  • Limit times during the work day for personal/political activity to obvious before-work, lunch-time, and after-work time periods.

2. Have a planned discussion with your boss about it.

  • Claim that you have particular political beliefs that are not do not represents the majority of the surrounding society.
  • Acknowledge that there are others who might disagree.
  • Commit to never start any kind of political strife at work. (More on that in number 4 below)

3. If you are in a position where you have clients, simply stay silent about politics unless the client has direct questions about your activities.

  • In most cases clients are focused on what they need you to do for them, not your beliefs about politics.
  • If they do want to know, then ask questions, too. Make sure that you are clear about their questions.
  • Only answer questions that they ask and add nothing more.

4. Do not engage in political activity, research, or reading on company equipment, spaces and time.

  • Remember, that space, equipment, and time belong  to the company.
  • If you do engage in personal use of space/equipment/time, that gives co-workers or a boss who disagree with your political views a pretext for getting you fired without having to claim their true motives.
  • Be easy to get along with on all things, including political statements that you might hear from those who think “everyone” believes their right-wing ideology.
  • Set a goal to make at least two work friends with people who you know disagree with you. It’s good for the company, you, and your sanity to have people who see you as a person and not an ideology.

5. In your personal life, go ahead and openly support particular candidates that reflect your beliefs unless they are openly working against your company. It is actually easier to defend your support of a candidate than general political beliefs.

  • It softens the discussion for co-workers or a boss to ask why you support a candidate rather than why you believe certain abstract concepts.
  • If a boss is worth working for, they will not want to seem vindictive and unfair. Punishing you in any way for working to support a candidate will make them seem to be that way, and so they will be reluctant to do so.

Are you working for a conservative boss? How have you dealt with keeping a good relationship while standing for what you believe? Please do comment.

Did you like this? If so, you might find these previous posts to be helpful:

Five Ways For Liberals to Overcome Those Red State Blues

Three Ways to Sway Your Red State Pastor From Blessing the Radical Right

Five Ways You Can Have a Progressive Influence on Your Red State

 

Politics

CONNECT to Shake Those Red State Blues

This is an expansion of the original post “Five Ways for Liberals to Overcome Those Red State Blues“.

The first way to shake those Red State Blues is to connect. A sense of isolation is the most prominent aspect of being liberal and living in a red state like mine, Oklahoma.

So how do we go about getting connected? It’s easier now than it’s ever been.  Here are some ideas:

Everyone wants your email address. If you are willing to share it, you will not be ignored. That’s not the hard part. Managing the avalanche of emails once you start sharing is the hard part. So, unless you are good at using Hotmail or Gmail tools that allow you to sort different kinds of emails as they come in, just set up a new email account that you will use only to give out to political organizations.

Plan out who you want to inform you. The obvious first stop is the Democratic party in your state. In Oklahoma City, for instance, search “Democratic Party in OKC” and you get this:

Democratic part in OkC Search resultsThis type of search will work for any state or city in which you live. As you can see there are plenty of avenues right here in this big-time red state of Oklahoma. If there are options to connect here, then there are even more options in your state.

Here in Oklahoma, the website to start will be: OkDemocrats.org From there you can find local groups in your county and city.

And yes, sometimes I get plenty disappointed in the national and state Democratic Party. But the reality is that the two “bigs”, Democratic and Republican parties, are very broad coalitions that help people find their way into more specific groups.

On Twitter: The obvious first step is @OkDemocrats. @OkPolicy is a good think tank to give you some hard info from the Progressive perspective. Pay attention to those emails from Twitter that give you some ideas about who to follow and expand your followings to stay informed.

On Facebook for Oklahoma: I have found many good groups to join that have kept me informed beyond the right-wing hype of big media controlled by corporate and conservative agendas. Especially helpful are the local state affiliates with Move-On.org. Since I have been a teacher of many sorts, I also am a part of several Facebook groups that focus on education issues. OkDemocrats is a good start on Facebook if you are in Oklahoma.

Face-to-face contact is the ultimate way to shake those Red State Blues. Political campaigns are a good way to get that type of  contact with others whose beliefs are like yours. Especially now, as primary season is underway, you will not have a hard time finding a campaign that would be glad to put you to work at their campaign headquarters doing all kinds of simple things or, if you are more brave, helping to knock doors and place signs for the candidate.

Listen to public radio to hear announcements that will give you ideas of events where you may meet fellow liberals for fun and dialogue. If you start with NPR.org, you can find the local affiliates in your state there. In Oklahoma, the two NPR stations are KOSU.org and KGOU.org, both connected to our largest universities.

Have you found good ways to connect to others who hold some of the same political views as you do? Let us know in the comments. (I will approve any comment that is not obviously a troll from the right trying to disrupt the conversation.) Or, comment in social media through Twitter @OklaBrett if you are outside of Oklahoma or @BrettDOkc if you are in Oklahoma.

Politics

Five Ways for Liberals to Overcome those Red State Blues

Yeah. It’s been a tough year so far in Oklahoma.  Those who actually expect logic and sanity to have anything to do with public policy are suffering what I call the Red State Blues.

We botched an execution where the condemned died a slow, agonizing death, which has made our state infamous to the rest of the nation and even world.

Our state legislature, more of an extension office of ALEC and the Koch Brothers, continues to gleefully pass laws that don’t matter and carefully avoid those that do.

So, it’s not unusual to hear liberals and progressives talking about the blues that develop after seeing so much idiocy in the public sphere. How we can overcome those Red State Blues?

In future posts I will develop more fully these five ways to do that:

1. Connect with fellow liberals and progressives locally, and in person.

Are you upset that the local paper sings only one note for the far right?  Do you get angry at the ways in which there is so much disruption and shouting on social media at times by those convinced of the correctness of their wing-nut agenda? One important way for liberals to have meaningful connections is in person and locally.

2. Develop a political posture that fits your personality.

Not everyone is well-suited to accept an arrest and jail time for a cause. And not everyone is suited to even go to a rally or march for a cause. But those aren’t the only two options for political involvement about what you believe. There are far more other ways to support the causes that capture your interest and passion.

3. Set a goal to do one new thing each year to promote progressive thinking and action in your city and state.

Sometimes we liberals in red states get the blues from just the enormity – the volume – of the crazy stuff that we see going on. It can seem like a flood that cannot be stopped. But, it can over time, if each liberal decides to pick one new thing that you can do to improve the public attitude about cultural and political issues. And the blues will go away as you see progress.

4. Let others know your position through social media in ways that do not offend your conservative friends and employer.

One large contributor to red state blues is the number of employers who ascribe to right-wing ideology and expect their employees to stay silent if they don’t agree, or to give active approval. You can express your political opinion as long as you are aware of the offense triggers that can cause trouble for you.

5. Move from being a resentful liberal to a politically active progressive.

This is the big one. Resentment is born from being a cultural minority in a red state. Being a racial and cultural minority is even harder. So the effort in shaking the red state blues is to not see yourself as helpless. You’re not. We can work our way out of that paralyzing resentment through political action that fits our personality and skills the best.

I’m looking forward to your response to these ideas as I develop them further over the next several weeks.

Politics

Three Ways to Sway Your Red-State Pastor from Blessing the Radical Right

If you are progressive and live in a politically deep red state you may wonder sometimes just how the atmosphere became, and remains, so pervasively radical and right-wing. It’s not by accident.

In part, it is due to Christian pastors who play into the hands of the power grab that is under way by radicals on the far right, funded by many wealthy people and organized by the Koch Brothers “octopus” of influence.

For a few pastors, siding with the radical right is cynical, intentional, and motivated by a desire for personal power. But, for the largest portion, the drift toward overt or subtle blessing of the radical right is so incremental that it goes unnoticed even by them until someone like you brings it to their attention.

Here are the three ways that progressives can disrupt this corrupting influence on your pastor, Christian faith, and elected government:

Realize that in your red state, there are people in your congregation who are demanding compliance with right-wing ideology. Every pastor that I have known in my red state deals with a constant barrage of demands from people who want the church to bless, promote, and comply with their political ideology.

Take action by expressing your objections to any accommodation or promotion of right-wing ideology with which you genuinely disagree.   No matter where they fall along the liberal-conservative-evangelical-Pentecostal spectrum of Christian expression, your pastor needs to know that “everyone” does not have the same political views as those right-wing folks who make weekly demands for political purity.

Follow up and persist so that your pastor remembers that there are many different opinions about solutions to political problems in your country, state, and town/city. As individuals among other individuals in America, Christians may contribute to solutions; but, there is no “Christian” solution to problems in a democracy. Right-wing purists want to insist that there is. Pastors must allow for political issues to be worked out in the public sphere that includes many more than are in your congregation or even belief system.

Smart pastors with integrity will welcome your counterbalance of pressure that will allow them to tell the right-wing purists that there are other people in their congregation who do not agree and must be considered, also. They will welcome the reminder that they are in the uniquely neutral position of being in the culture while not being completely of it.

Some smart ones don’t need intervention at all. My strongly evangelical pastor regularly claims in his sermons that Jesus is not a Republican or a Democrat and demands that people leave him alone about it. Ha!

On the other hand, pastors who are hungry for personal acclaim and approval, or who don’t want to see the difference between right-wing political ideology and conservative Christian expression, simply do not deserve your support. They are neither effective leaders of the Christian Faith or of the political sphere. Once you are convinced that they are intent upon only blessing a certain brand of secular politics, then it’s time to go. There is never any need to attack. Just be calm, but clear about why with that pastor and others who ask.

It is important that you not engage in a large conflict with other members of your congregation with whom you disagree. It will be energy wasted on tearing up a congregation instead of expressing your faith in a different congregation whose ministry you can truly support. Save that fight for your democracy, which is where the active debate over political ideas is legitimate, necessary, and expected.

End Note: I have been a teacher in Oklahoma for the last 19 years. Before that, I was a Methodist pastor here for 17 years. I know personally how hard it is to be a pastor in a red state. So, this is no attack on pastors. In fact, it is a process that will liberate them.