[manyxcxi]

I can vote for the people (at every level) that I think will spend the taxes I am legally obligated to pay in a way I agree with and I can follow up with successively vociferous concerns (letters < community organization < protest, etc), but at a certain point my freedom (or life) can be threatened.

Employers can’t (yet) do the same. I’m under no obligation to them to do what I morally disagree with because I can always quit playing their game.

All I can do to quit my country is uproot from everything I’ve ever known, including my family, to another country that I agree with more that will also let me in.

They’re completely different situations and I’m pretty sure we all recognize that, but I’ll add my own personal anecdotes:

Employer

I don’t like the idea of software patents or generic business patents that can be summed up with “... do it on a computer”. I created some really awesome things for an employer many moons ago that were essentially revolutionizing how people in this very particular niche could more efficiently do their jobs. What did I really do though? I put together some open source tools completely foreign to this niche, glued them together with some nifty ideas and code that I wrote, put a decent unified UI on it, and packaged it up as a virtual machine appliance for our people in the field. My company wanted me to sign the invention away so they could patent it, and were going to put in 5 different applications. It was sign on the dotted line or walk, I walked at significant financial penalty.

Government

My dad’s from Libya. I lived there for a while growing up, and all my dad’s family is still in Tripoli. They all hated Gadaffi, and with the Arab spring uprising- things were getting bad. I joined in some protests across the US asking for intervention. Welp, we got what we asked for but not what we wanted. Turns out governments and geopolitics are tricky.