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1) This is a Tweet thread of some thoughts related to my professional life from which I am now happily retired (except for a per-visit job with my local church to make ends meet), my activism (#AntiTrumpActivist), and my social media presence. It might be boring to all but a few.
2) A week or three ago, I attracted ire for the first time for my having worked in @DeptofDefense for over three decades, as a result of commentary I made to an @ericgarland post: ire and not entirely wanted attention, probably for both of us. (Sorry, Eric.)
3) I don't blame anybody, not really, for any sort of animosity toward me for having worked all my life as a civilian for "the US War Machine." That machine, like many others in our government, is rife with corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse, and the issue of war is not settled.
4) But I took the job I did, at the recommendation of my college adviser in my major field, who happened to be retired Air Force, because of my background (mathematics) and the good fit in temperament he saw between me and the agency to which he recommended me to apply.
5) I always saw myself as anti-war, but also a kind of law-and-order kid as well, vacillating between my dreams of being a hippie and my Southern Baptist upbringing in the state of Georgia, a fundamentalist faith I held quite strongly in the late 1970s when I sent my application.
6) It was a strange mix of philosophies, and I was known by friends as somewhat philosophical and definitely strange. The way I rationalized it was that I would not be working for @DeptofDefense to participate in active war making, but to do what I could to prevent it.
7) If the skills in which I hoped to train as a mathematician could provide breakthroughs that could be used to the United States' advantage against our foreign adversaries, I saw that would tend to make war LESS likely. Bullies hold back when they see you have the upper hand.
8) I've learned much since then. I also realize the huge amount of naïvete with which I viewed the world, naïvete I did not easily outgrow. I learned to appreciate whistleblowers. I spent a good part of the second half of my career speaking out on management issues, critically.
9) That, plus a career field change within my agency that actually made me a better and happier worker several times over, also made me unpromotable: no raises for the entire last half of my time there. That hurt me when retirement came.
10) I inwardly cheered the stories of whistleblowers I was starting to notice in broadcast and print journalism. (I even put "friend to whistleblowers" in my Twitter profile, but have removed it recently, since I do realize whistleblowers are not necessarily virtuous.)
11) And I will also say that I would have a major crisis of conscience were I continuing to work there now: In the @DeptofDefense, your tip-top boss is @POTUS. I hope you can understand how any social-justice-conscious human being would have such a problem.
12) Then again, as I indicated earlier, I do understand how "being active for social justice" and "working for and alongside the US military" would seem irreconcilable to some. I imagine working inside the Intelligence Community would raise even more hackles.
13) I retired as soon as I could collect my pension, during @BarackObama's first term in office, figuring I'd get the heck out of DoD rather than spend more years unable to shut my mouth and thus putting a raise further and further out of reach.
14) My supervisor in the last office in which I worked did not have to review my "promotion folder" before sending it upstairs. She chose to do so, recommended I not get a raise, and she got the very raise for which we were both competing. I cried.
15) I now see that "the War machine" is full, like much of government, of sycophants, of people who will game the system for their own advancement, and of men and women who got rich pushing the Overpaid Defense Contractor culture over the Rewarding Direct Hires culture.
16) So yeah. If you find out I worked as a civilian for @DeptofDefense, you can think less of me. I was not in the battlefields as were our fallen heroes we commemorate this weekend. And I may not have been particularly talented at what I did even AFTER the career field change.
17) I was able to use the skills I gained in college which I determined more practically employable (ask me about my choice not to pursue the professional acting field if you want to make me cry again sometime). I've kept my family fed and housed.
18) I did not make perfect decisions (unfortunate personal ones were why I didn't save up more money), and my opinions even today aren't perfect. I just thought some of y'all might like to read a little about the person behind the opinions some of you have trashed.
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