Source: http://www.uexpressit.com/_StandUp_SpeakOut.jpg

Re-reading The ClueTrain Manifesto, a process that began as I considered the Edjurist’s words, and ran across this paragraph that just moved me.

Just about all the concessions we make to work in a well-run, non-disturbing, secure, predictably successful, managed environment have to do with giving up your voice. Nothing is more intimately a part of who we are than our voice. it expresses what we think and feel. It is an amalgam of the voluntary and involuntary. It gives style and and shape to content. It subtends the most public and the most private. it is what we withhold at the moments of greatest significance.

Our voice is our strongest, most direct expression of who we are. Our voice is expressed in our words, our tone, our body language, our visible enthusiasm…We are all victims of this assault on voice, the attempt to get us to shut up and listen to the narrowest range of ideas imaginable.

And on the following page…the words of John Jay Chapman (1900):

I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don’t be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.

Words to live by, for sure!

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