Enough is Enough
After GDPR became law following data gatherers’ failure to regulate themselves, an outpouring of messages started to arrive day after day, week after week. They all started out the same: “We believe in X” or “our stance is Y.” Email after email came in about how they were GDPR-compliant and how good they’d be with our personal information.
Those emails felt like platitudes.
And then COVID-19 struck, and day after day we saw email after email about what companies were doing in response to COVID-19. Again it was “we believe in X” and “our stance is Y.” Or they said “we’re opening up our data, our company, our whatever, in the name of the greater good.”
On and on the emails came. And as they came, they too started to feel automatic.
Now our world is melting down, rightfully, over frustration with an overly militarized police force whose bad actors blight the reputations of their committed brotherhood and sisterhood. They, too, didn’t self-regulate. Since Rodney King, we have been witness to violence unfolding in living color in our living rooms, and now on every screen we own, at the hands of those whose motto is “to serve and protect.”
Our trust is shattered, and we are angry. We are sick of it. How can we not be when the stories of brutality have gone on and on for so long? I hurt over the violence that comes from the hands of those we’ve hired to look after us.
Families and communities are being ripped apart. Innocent people of color are not meant to die at the hands of the police. Enough is enough.
We must respond; please be careful with the emails, though. Like with GDPR and the pandemic, too many brands that we don’t have relationships with are finding it necessary to put out letters that are already feeling too automatic. Yesterday I heard from Lulu & Georgia, a company I recently bought furniture from. Once. And then from Trina Turk, who I haven’t shopped with in years. I also received something from a site I’ve never purchased from but somehow landed on their mailing list. As one leader said yesterday: “It’s not what we say. It’s what we do. We aren’t putting out any communications, we’re taking action.”
So please take action about these wrongs. Send messages when your staff is fully diverse, your leadership team is equally so, and you’ve petitioned your local police force and county and state officials to fix the systemic wrongs we witness when it comes to those who are meant to keep us safe.
Send notes to your internal teams about what you will do when you hire again or what time off you’ll give your teams to do what they think is right, whether it’s volunteering, peacefully protesting, or sending petitions. Please send the notes when you’ve opened up an honest dialog in your community about what you can do as an employer or as a friend. Go into the danger of honest dialog that confronts the issues and fears that have plagued our country for far too long.
That’s what we are doing. No emails. You won’t hear from me on this topic until we’re sure our own house is in order. We all have work to do.
Since the beginning of time, humans have demonstrated extreme violence and disregard because of our differences, whether ethnic, religious, or driven by race or sex or disability. We just witnessed 40,000 elders succumbing to COVID-19 in US nursing homes because our care for our elders is weak at the seams. Some could call it ageism. There are many wrongs that need righting.
We are also capable of great things when we put our minds to it. So pick a place to start. Take your issue of choice. Put the emails away and, as Nike says: “Just do it.” Start fixing the problem. Because once again, enough is enough.
May George Floyd and those before him rest in peace knowing that they didn’t die in vain.