Kerby Anderson

Back in the early 1970s, John Lennon wrote the song “Imagine” which was his vision of a future of global harmony. Jim Geraghty recently wrote about the culture war and corporate America. He encouraged us to imagine a future where businesses weren’t trying to be woke but instead catered to the needs of their consumers.

What brought about his comments was a headline in New York magazine that lamented that after the fiascos of Bud Light and Target, we were now entering a new era corporate caution. But he doesn’t see (nor do I see) any evidence of corporate caution. Here are a few things he thought we should imagine.

“Imagine a beer company that just wanted to make good beer and sell it to you. Imagine if that company wanted to sell beer to everyone but didn’t feel that its job was to make you more accepting of transgender individuals.”

“Imagine an everything store like Target that wanted everyone to shop there, but that had the good sense to realize that partnering with a brand that had ‘Satanist-inspired merchandise’ was not the way to win over shoppers in a country that is still roughly two-thirds Christian.”

“Imagine a sports team that declared everyone was welcome but didn’t formally and publicly roll out the welcome mat for the quasi-pornographic Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.”

He provides other examples, but you get the idea. It seems like every major company feels the need to lecture us about social, political, and cultural issues. In previous commentaries, I have recommended that companies stay out of the culture wars. Unfortunately, there are just enough progressive social warriors in some of these companies that they just cannot help themselves and eventually alienate half of their customer base.

I would love to imagine a world where corporations avoid lecturing us and merely produce goods and services. But I’m afraid they can’t imagine such a world.