Free Speech And Its Consequences
June 20, 2006
5:05 AM CST
As an addendum to yesterday’s post on discrimination and the freedoms thereof, I want to add something important.
As many of you are aware, this website went through a few transformations over the years. At first I blogged under kimdutoit.com, then nationofriflemen.com, and now theothersideofkim.com.
The switch from NOR to here was because I didn’t want my opinions to represent the NOR as a whole, and besides, we need to consider the ongoing project of turning the NOR into a full-blown not-for-profit organization.
I could have gone back to kimdutoit.com, but I’m a guy. We never turn around. We never stop to ask directions. We always forge ahead. More importantly, however, the reasons why I stopped blogging under my name were temporary ones, and no longer relevant.
Consider it temporary insanity, but the shock of discovering that my website made me unemployable by corporate America came at a vulnerable time. Desperate to become gainfully employed after closing my consulting business for the business failure that was Did Today, I put my resume out for work (and it is a fairly impressive one, I have to say). As most of you know, the corporation that offered me a job disappeared from the face of the earth after finding my website. To this day they’ve never returned my phone calls, the cowardly lickspittles. A few months more got me several calls, but after “due diligence” those calls too dried up.
I gave up looking.
When the issue of my website came up I shut the site down (for a few days), contacted friends who linked to me asking them to stop using my name. What I’ve never done (and this post serves as that purpose) was to notify them that they no longer had to be concerned about this.
I have accepted the reality that no corporation in America will touch me, or at least not one in my field. I don’t know what they think I am, or the risk they feel they would take by associating with me, but Tech Support and I long ago decided it was not a direction we could go. If a corporation feels at all threatened by my opinions and life philosophy, it’s not a corporation I want to work for.
Tech Support took a fulltime job a few months back, which is why her presence here is limited. It is also why she stopped her blog, permanently. I didn’t say she stopped blogging. She exists in the ether that is the blogosphere, just not under her own name. She was very clear with her employer that she had a blog history, and they didn’t make any fuss about it. In fact, they wondered why it would even be an issue they should be concerned about. But to be faithful to the idea that she wouldn’t want to do anything that would put her public face in conflict with the job, she decided to blog under an assumed name. And, no, I won’t tell you what that is—and I’d be obliged if you didn’t make it a public guessing-game in Comments, either, for obvious reasons.
On weekends Tech Support and I spend our time on The Shooting Trail. Evenings we work on publishing my novels, tending to this site, and trying to get more than five hours of sleep. I earn a small bit of revenue from this site through BlogAds and t-shirt sales. The kind donations we receive from some of you often makes the difference in our quality of life. It’s a busy schedule, with little time for leisure, especially for Tech Support, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.
We’ve moved on, as they say. The world is what it is. There are worse things. We’ve accepted that there are consequences for speaking plainly. We accept those consequences as the cost of the freedom to speak. I won’t take back anything I’ve said in the past. America and its problems will not be ignored, nor will I ever again try to stifle my history of plain speaking.
In other words, folks, my job is the blogosphere, this website and The Shooting Trail.
This isn’t a blegging post, and I hope no one takes it that way. The point of all of this is to explain just one thing: I am what I am. And who I am is…
Kim du Toit
Use it freely.
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