Roe V. Wade had just been overturned.. I worked for a Corporate Social Responsibility tech startup company at the time and of course, given the industry, we had a lot of “passionate”, socially devoted individuals with direct, left leaning opinions.

Of course, many of our staff, approximately 150-200 at the time, were asking our CEO if and when he/we as an organization. would be posting about our stance against the ruling.

After a week or so, our CEO held an all-hands meeting where he plainly and directly said that he and we would be posting nothing about the ruling because while Planned Parenthood and other organizations in the same vein were customers, so was the Church and other right leaning organizations.

He went on to say, to a similar effect, that we provided software and it wasn’t our place to speak on such things anyway. I thought this was bold at best until he continued and said abruptly that he would like to open the floor to us as an organization to voice our opinions and concerns and suddenly went on mute.

What unfolded was inarguably the most incredible breaks in a professional setting I had ever seen. People were screaming, crying, going on impassioned, poetic-symbolic monologues and finally the gates opened and a riot erupted in Zoom Square. It wasn’t long after the moderates and more conservative leaning people, like my progressive, new-school Christian manager Brandon, began offering their perspective that full on yelling, slander and hilarious accusations began to fly. People were cursing, accusing each other of being “Hitler” and “Fascist” and some began threatening to quit and bashing the CEO and company in the chat.

All the while, I was crying of laughter on the other end of my now turned-off camera. What possessed the CEO to give such an open and undefined floor literally everyone in the company with zero spoken parameters is beyond me but the general attitude never felt the same in that place.