The phoniness of free riders who benefit from the heavy lifting of earlier generations.

Long before the word “gay” came into popular use, long before the word “pride” was modified by the word “gay,” and long before gay marriage was sanctioned, two gay guys, Ken and Gerry, were good friends of my working-class parents.  Lifelong partners, both were white-collar professionals and, in my estimation as a kid, great guys.  Their sexual preference was irrelevant to me and my parents, and while they didn’t hide it, they also weren’t crusaders about it.

It was the same with other gays I later came to know, whether in college, business, or the neighborhood.

Now I’m being asked in TV commercials and in messages that come across my computer screen to “Celebrate gay pride during LGBTQ+ Pride Month.”

How am I supposed to do that?  Shooting off fireworks in the backyard?  Tying rainbow-colored balloons to my mailbox at the street?  Wearing a party hat?

And if I did that, how does it change American society for the better?

Speaking of change:  Circa 1990, when I was a business executive before “transgender” became a cause du jour, an employee in one of my departments began transitioning from a man to a woman.  No big deal.  His preferences were accommodated on how he wanted to be addressed and what restroom he wanted to use, and I quietly got the word out to his coworkers that the company expected them to be mature adults about it.

It was a similar story at other large corporations at the time, as I knew from being a member of a business roundtable that met to discuss human resources issues.

Back then, there was not any hullabaloo about sexual and gender preferences:  no rainbow banners at company facilities, no saccharine messages on company message boards, and no advertising touting how wonderfully open-minded my employer and I were or how thoroughly modern and hip we were.

Now retired, I’m getting messages like the following every day:  “Improve LGBTQ+ students’ experience.”

How am I supposed to do that?  And what about the experience of heterosexual students?

Another message suggests an answer:  “June is LGBTQ+ Pride Month.  Celebrate in classrooms across the country with GISEN.  Donate now!”

The same answer about donating appeared in this message:  “NBJC promotes racial equity for Black LGBTQ+/SGL people.  Donate now!”

In addition to messages about sexual and gender identity, Americans are bombarded daily by a barrage of shopworn commercials, advertisements, and messages about diversity and inclusion.  There are so many that companies seem to be in the business of selling diversity instead of the business of selling goods and services. 

On second thought, they seem to be in the business of selling baloney.

Once again, this is quite a contrast with my experience decades ago, when my employer and I, as well as other like-minded executives and employers, engaged in quiet but effective efforts at equal opportunity, affirmative action, racial sensitivity training, and the more recent name for all this, “diversity,” which entered the lexicon after R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr. published his landmark Harvard Business Review article on the subject.  

Internal political battles were fought, racist and sexist employees and managers were fired, the numbskulls at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were humored so that they didn’t stop progress with their bureaucratic bumbling, and the vast majority of employees heard and heeded the message without being beaten over the head.  We called this leadership.

At the same time, with no fanfare, my employer addressed the woefully inadequate education of its black employees in the Deep South.  Illiterate employees were given the opportunity to learn to read and write at company expense so that they could operate new manufacturing technology.  Almost all of them took the opportunity, and they later beamed with pride at an in-house graduation ceremony that their families attended.

None of this was delegated to a department of diversity and inclusion because there wasn’t such a department.  And there wasn’t such a department, because company leaders were doing their job of leading.

Today, whether in industry, government, or academia, leaders have become followers with respect to diversity and inclusion.  They parrot platitudes and banalities, they kowtow to pressure groups, they engage in tokenism and pandering, and they run unoriginal and farfetched commercials and ads, featuring the requisite number of races, skin shades, eye shapes, mixed marriages, and sexual and gender identities.

It’s all so formulaic, superficial, and tiresome.

Today’s leaders cum followers also cater to their idealistic, naïve, and programmed employees, the ones who mistake virtue-signaling for virtue, righteousness for being right, sanctimony for seriousness, progressiveness for progress, and politically-correct pronouns for pertinence.

Most of them, executives and rank-and-file knowledge workers alike, live and work in cocoons—in places that might have some modicum of diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, but are homogenous in social class, education, and, yes, privilege and power.

They benefit from the heavy lifting of those from earlier generations who fought hard battles for equal rights and risked their careers in the process.  As free riders, the cocoon dwellers advance their careers, not by doing anything serious about the socio-economic issues of the day, but by putting on party hats and celebrating LGBTQ+.