HeidiAllen.com

CBS will be running an anti-abortion ad from far-right group ‘Focus on the Family‘ during the Super Bowl. This is after they made a big stink on more than one occassion over their policy of not running “controversial” ads from other, more moderate groups.

Here’s what I wrote to them. If you feel the same way, please chime in.

I don’t have a problem with Focus on the Family exercising their right to free speech during the Super Bowl SO LONG AS that same courtesy is extended to other advocacy groups. Since CBS made a big issue of not running more moderate advocacy ads, you clearly have a bias. It’s this that I strongly object to.

If you open the flood gates to one group, you must open the flood gates to all. CBS may be powerful, but never forget that it’s the American people who own the airwaves, not you.

Another Martin Luther King Jr Day has come, and again, news outlets phone in their headlines about the “Slain Civil Rights Leader”. They take the safe, easy way out, disrespecting King by painting him merely as a black leader while ignoring important and still-controversial components of his great legacy. While King was undoubtedly the most important figure of the civil rights era, he was also much, much more.

Like pretty much all of my heroes, Dr. King was driven by Love.. Love with a capital “L”. Love led him to active compassion. Compassion naturally extended into a committment to non-violence, social justice and human rights. His civil rights work, condemnation of the Vietnam War, of nuclear proliferation and of colonialism were just some of the ways in which Dr. King acted as a humble servant of Love.

The King Center, founded by his wife, Coretta Scott King, quotes him thus:

“Life’s most persistent and nagging question, he said, is `what are you doing for others?’.”

This is why they call MLK Day ‘A Day of Service’ and ‘A Day On, Not A Day Off‘. Put aside some time to serve others, even if it’s just for an hour or two. By honoring King’s legacy, you’ll also honor the best within yourself.

The watered down King tributes try to make Dr. King’s vision something small and non-threatening… some anachronism tied to a single, supposedly resolved issue and time. The real Martin Luther King, Jr presented us… all of us… with a challenge that is as critically important today as the day he uttered these quotes:

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

“They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction….The chain reaction of evil–hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars–must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”

“…we are challenged to achieve a world perspective. Anyone who feels that we can live in isolation today, anyone who feels that we can live without being concerned about other individuals and other nations is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one. The great challenge now is to make it one in terms of brotherhood.”

“We must all learn to live together as brothers – or we will all perish together as fools. This is the great issue facing us today. No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone. We are tied together.”

“All I’m saying is simply this: that all mankind is tied together; all life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be – this is the interrelated structure of reality.”

“We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.”

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

I used to be an independent IT contractor, and one of the things that I disliked about the job was the difficulty in getting behemoth companies to react to changing technology. There seemed to be three primary reasons for this:

1. The opinions of high level managers trumped the advice from experts. No effort was made to weigh differing opinions against the facts.
2. Pre-existing contracts with fellow behemoth companies made upgrading to current technology legally impossible and/or financially prohibitive.
3. Employees comfortable with the existing technology were so fearful of change that they would impede or even sabotage attempts to bring software and hardware up to date.

This last phenomenon appeared to happen primarily on a subconscious, rather than conscious level. However, there were contractors whose continued lucrative employment depended on the ongoing use of outdated technology. On at least one occassion, a contractor bragged to me that he had so “personalized” his code that the company would have to continue renewing his contract forever if they wanted their technology to work.

Bottom line: The customers of these companies suffered, whether they were aware of it or not. Their data was harder to obtain. Customer Service reps had access to fewer tools, which slowed them down. Websites were designed by third parties with no understanding of specific customer needs and expectations. Lastly, updates rarely happened.

Surfing around the web, I see these problems played out repeatedly. Today, I came across the International Finance Corporation’s page, ‘How To Report Fraud and Corruption‘. The IFC is a member of the World Bank, and is the world’s largest lender for privately financed projects in “developing” nations. Billions of dollars and millions of lives ride of its ability to operate efficiently and effectively. Yet this short, but important webpage features not a form, but a clickable email address.

Why  is that a problem? First of all, users should have some sort of guidance as to the specific information they need to provide when it comes to something this important. Web forms are commonplace these days. A business entity of IFC’s size shouldn’t be using a method that’s at least a decade old.

Of greater concern, spammers have software that “crawls” the web, much like search engines do. This software looks for email addresses. Congratulations, IFC! You’ll receive so much spam that it will be nearly impossible to sort the junk from legitimate fraud complaints.

But my post isn’t intended to target the IFC. Rather, I’m presenting a problem in search of a solution. How do you change entrenched corporate culture? How do you get an elephant to move with the speed of a gazelle? Google does it, so clearly, such a thing is possible. Now the new paradigm needs to propagate… faster.