It's an interesting conundrum, this world of blogging. Many people blog. Some use their real names, while others hide under assumed names. The reasons are different for each person. Some people want to maintain their anonymity because they're shy. Others want to maintain their anonymity because they're just mean and abusive; I hate those types. And others do it because, for some reason, they feel that if their employers know they're blogging, even if it has nothing to do with the organization, that the company won't like it and might fire them.

Such is the case with this woman, named Victoria Martinez. She was an independent blogger who wrote under an assumed name about things around the city of Philadelphia. She never trashed the company she worked with, called the Negro Educational Emergency Drive, helps attain scholarships and educational opportunities for disadvantaged students.

She wrote under an assumed name for whatever her reasons were. She got popular. People wanted to know who she really was. Some were getting close, and so, though CNN, she decided to "out" herself before someone else did. The next day, this organization fired her. I went looking through 10 pages of her blog to see if she'd wrote disparaging things about this organization; she had not. Sure, she'd written about things going on around her city, and not all of it was good, but so what; whose city only has good, positive things going on?

This is the thing about privacy. Many times I've written here saying that people must be ready to accept the consequences of their actions. Usually those actions are negative, bad things, things that a person might not say if they were standing right in front of the person they're saying those things about, or things they're doing to others without a second thought. In this case, I think the ones who are going to potentially suffer consequences of their actions more than this young lady is the company that fired her. And that's not right because it destroys their mission, which means it may destroy the possibility that those kids they're supposedly trying to serve won't get to have the opportunities they deserve.

I did something that's not really rare for me, but that I haven't done in years. I wrote a letter to this organization letting them know I was disappointed in them. No, I don't expect to hear back from them; I'm betting I'm not alone. And I'm betting they don't care. I also wrote on this young woman's blog, giving her well wishes, along with more than 200 other people, and saying I hope she gets a bigger and better job. She has two kids, a 2 & 6 year old, and was fired for saying what she wanted to say. Seems she knew she was working for an organization that was more worried about their image than the reality of the world.

If this had been a white organization, people would have been more up in arms about it, and how it treated this minority woman. That this black organization treated this Latino woman the way they did,... if I didn't say anything about it, I'd be a hypocrite, and that I hope never to be.

At least I now have a better understanding of this one group of people who hide behind their anonymity; I hope to never be one of them. This isn't how leaders are supposed to treat their employees.