Notice of Termination
A second HR notice, since the first one did not take
I am usually pretty even-keel. Not these days. Lately, I’ve been feeling more discomfort and more ill at ease than I’m used to. Dis-regulated, to borrow a word from every health and wellness podcast I listen to. And wherever I turn, the theme is the same. The grocery bill and the gas bill, competing for the same sweat-inducing nightmare. Data centers eating up rural land in a country that does not have enough rural land left. Substack love quietly competing with actual human community. The wars. The AI we cannot predict. A government seemingly off the rails. It feels like we are living through a transition that does not have a name yet.
If you are into stars and paradigms, the universe is shifting. The technological world is shifting too. The agricultural revolution became the industrial revolution, and now we are sliding into whatever this is.
I think I’ve subconsciously known for a while that the status quo wasn’t going to cut it anymore. As an “employer” (and yes, I’m about to explain that), I expect more of the people who work on my behalf. As an entrepreneur and a creator, I’ve been quietly shifting the way I work and what I work on for the last couple of years. And as a human, I am more acutely aware than I’ve ever been of how fractured the global community feels, and how small and insignificant it can feel to be one person in billions who needs things to change.
So I started thinking outside the box. And I mean that the way I mean it in my design practice, not the way a LinkedIn post means it. When I have a design problem I can’t solve, when a room refuses to come together no matter how many times I rearrange the furniture, I start over. I pull out a fresh piece of graph paper, and I wipe the Pinterest boards and the magazine clippings and the preconceived notions out of my head, and I ask myself: what would I do in this room if there were no budget, no fixed walls, and the client wasn’t married to navy blue? What would this space look like if I designed it around what the client actually needs instead of what they think they want?
That’s the question I’ve been sitting with about this country. What would it look like if we stopped rearranging the furniture?
Yes, I know “thinking outside the box” is a phrase from 1994. So is my voter registration card. Bear with me.
To: All Elected Officials of the United States
From: The Office of Human Resources, American People Division
Subject: Termination of Employment, Effective Immediately
Dear Employees,
This letter serves as your formal notice of termination.
Per the terms of your original Performance Improvement Plan, this review should have been conducted thirty days after issuance. In the interest of fairness, and if we are being honest, hope, the Office of Human Resources elected to extend the review period. We wanted to give you time. We hoped you would use it.
We regret to inform you that you did not.
To be clear, there are individuals who have done real work. There always are. But exceptions are not a functioning system, and the system is what is failing.
The following performance deficiencies remain unresolved:
You have not upheld the Constitution. You have interpreted it selectively, when it was convenient, and ignored it when it was not. Several of you have cited documents you have clearly not read. At least one of you appears to believe the Constitution is a “vibe.
You have not served the public interest above your personal or party interest. You have served donors, factions, and the loudest voices in your mentions. Several of you have held town halls exclusively inside your own offices, which does not count.
You have left the building while the work was unfinished. The shutdown continued. People went without paychecks, without flights, without the services they had already paid for with their taxes. You went home for the holiday. Several of you used the optics of that suffering to make a point about the other side, which HR would like to note is not the same thing as fixing it. A shareholder watching this from home does not care whose fault the shutdown is. A shareholder wants the lights back on. Performing concern on the way to your break is not concern. It is content.
You have not conducted yourselves with professionalism, honesty, or basic decorum. We have watched. It has been something to see. Reviewing the footage for this report required two cups of coffee and a short lie-down.
Effective immediately, your employment with the American People is terminated.
Please return your access badges, your committee assignments, your unearned sense of importance, and the lapel pin you have been wearing as though it meant something. Your parking space will be reassigned. Your office will be packed by the end of the week.
This decision is not personal. It is simply accountability, the same standard every other employee in this country is held to, and the same standard you agreed to when you took the oath.
A Note Regarding Next Steps
The next shareholder vote is scheduled for November. In the meantime, the American People, Inc. is a constituent-owned company with roughly 350 million shareholders, and given the scope of the restructuring ahead, the Office of Human Resources is convening an emergency All-Hands Restructuring Summit.
All shareholders are invited and encouraged to attend.
Pre-work materials will be distributed in a forthcoming communication. Attendees should come prepared to discuss what we actually want in the next hire, starting, as all good design projects do, with a blank piece of graph paper.
Save the date. Details to follow.
A Note From Your HR Rep, Off the Record
Before I sign off, one more thing. And this one isn’t from HR. It’s from me.
I am a registered Democrat. I have been my entire adult voting life. And for most of that time, voting felt like enough. Show up, mark the ballot, and trust that the people we elected, on both sides of the aisle, would do the work we hired them to do. Because once the voting is over, that is how it is supposed to work. One thing that became clear to me while writing the first of these letters (Your Work For Me) is that once a candidate is elected, they do not work for the people who voted for them. They work for everyone. All of us. The ones who picked them, the ones who did not, and the ones who sat the whole thing out. And the smart ones, the ones who understand their new job, try even harder to win over the people who did not vote for them. If for no other reason than because it makes their own work easier.
A leader who only serves half the room is not leading. They are campaigning.
Lately, standing in the middle of this dumpster fire, I have realized the wheels are off the bus and the old rules do not apply anymore. When everything is on fire, loyalty to a party starts to feel a lot like rearranging the furniture.
And I am not saying any of this from above it. I am in it, like everyone else. That is part of why I am writing it down.
None of what I am talking about here is me giving up on the two-party system. I still believe in it. I think it works, or it should work, because most of us are not purely one thing or the other.
Most of us hold a mix of views, some that lean one way, some that lean the other, and the friction between the two sides is supposed to produce better decisions than either side would make alone. That is the point. Compromise is not a failure of conviction. It is the whole mechanism.
Changing your mind when the other side makes a compelling argument is not flip-flopping. It is thinking. It is what grown-ups do when they are given new information. Somewhere along the way, we started treating listening to the other side as a form of surrender. It is not. It is just part of the job.
I know what I want now. And I would vote against my own party in a hot minute to get it. Not because I don’t believe in my party,
Because I believe the job matters more than the jersey.
I want leaders of any party, any background, any letter next to their name, who understand that they work for 350 million people, not for a donor list. I want leaders who give us enough freedom to be ourselves and thrive. Enough honesty to keep us all on the same page. And enough community standards to act as helpful guardrails, not obstructions.
I want leaders who lead the way good parents lead. And I don’t mean parents of toddlers, who need to be told not to touch the stove. I mean parents of teenagers and adults, people who deserve real information, real honesty, and the respect of being trusted to make their own decisions when they have what they need. That is what leadership of a grown country looks like. Anything less is just management.
I think about this more now that a new generation is arriving in my own family. The world they are inheriting will be strange in ways none of us can yet fully picture. AI, we cannot predict. A global community that feels more fractured by the day. A pace of change that is not going to slow down to wait for us to catch up. The people we hire to lead us through that need to be better than what we have. Not more partisan. Not more combative. Just better. More level-headed, more inclusive, more honest, and more willing to act like adults in a room full of other adults.
That is the bar. It is not a high bar. It is the minimum.
This concludes today’s HR communication. Please report to the All-Hands Restructuring Summit ready to work. Pre-work materials forthcoming.
Your employer is watching.
Sincerely,
Carter S. White, Head of Human Resources, American People Division
Read Part I of this three-part series here: You Work For Me 👈
