danhou.com

It seems like the professional job market these days is getting tighter and tighter as the number of college graduates each year increases. Couple this with the fact that virtually everyone’s got some piece of themselves posted on the information superhighway, and it looks like Corporate America has found yet another filter for potential hires.

Many managers are now running searches through MySpace and Facebook to see the “other” side of employees. According to one expert, “It’s a big problem when someone’s Facebook profile says that her favorite thing is to get shitfaced on a Saturday night.”

I don’t buy it for a moment. Even if taken from a purely pragmatic perspective, what a person does with their free time should have no impact on how they perform in the work place. I mean, most of the rock stars I know work hard and play hard. I know a lot of guys that drink heavily or smoke copious amounts of gange. They still show up at work every morning and kick all manners of ass.

But this goes beyond pragmatism - its a matter of principle. In my mind, its like the separation of church and state. Your personal life is exactly that - personal. It’s bad enough that most people bring their work home in the evenings and put in time on the weekends. You spend enough time in the office dressed and acting as they want you to. Now on top of all that, you’ve got to censor yourself online?

The US government would never be able to get away with this. So how is it that the corporations can?

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with the news as much, this past weekend there was a murdering spree that occured on 21st & E Republican - two blocks from where I lived for the past year.

I used to walk Pogo by that house every other day, often times in the middle of the night, and I never felt the slightest bit unsafe. The ironic thing is, I remember some locals claiming that I lived in a shady area due to its proximity to Deano’s and all the gang violence that implies. My experience has been, with just a little bit of common sense (i.e. don’t walk into Deano’s at 3am on a Friday night), I can live a block away and have nothing to fear.

The thing I found deeply disturbing about Saturday’s tragedy is that nobody has thus far been able to identify a motive. Neither the police, nor the friends and acquaintences of the suspect. This was literally an after-party, just like any other, except that seemingly for no reason at all, a guy decides to blow away everyone in sight.

This brings me to the race issue - Deano’s is a primarily black establishment, while Saturday’s mass murder occured at a white, rave scene. Much of the violence that occurs at Deano’s can be traced back to angry words and crimes of passion. But what motivated this weekend’s devastation? Witnesses told the police that the gunman had been “quiet and humble” at the party and hadn’t argued with anyone.

While I can’t say I can relate to a rage intense enough to drive a man to shoot someone in the head, at least this emotion makes sense to me on some level. Since I can understand the motivation, I can avoid behavior that would cause someone to react with that kind of violence. I don’t, however, understand the mild mannered white guy who’s secretly bugnuts. And we tend to fear that which we don’t understand.

The media has a field day building up this fearsome image of the angry black man and the crimes that he’s capable of committing. I say fuck that shit. The angry black man is the devil you know, and can therefore avoid, making it the lesser of two evils. The States should be far more concerned with the psychotic white guy. He’s the Columbines, the Unabombers and the Green River Killers - he’s the devil you don’t know. By the time you see him coming, its already too late.