Why I Stopped Being Angry and Started Being Alert

Earlier this year I found myself doing something I'm not proud of: posting angry screeds on LinkedIn about the state of our democracy. The posts felt good to write. They changed nothing.

Then I noticed my feed filling up with similar posts from similarly frustrated professionals - lawyers, executives, consultants, educators - and it hit me: anger without organization is just noise. And noise doesn't move people.

So I took a deep breath and asked myself: what was I actually trying to accomplish?

The answer was clear. I believed that many of our business leaders were badly misjudging the level of concern among the people around them. Shielded by a professional culture that discourages political expression, they were interpreting silence as acceptance. And that silence, our silence, was making it easier for them to look away as democratic norms eroded around us.

The problem wasn't that professionals didn't care. It was that we had no appropriate way to show it.

I thought about the millions of Americans who had shown up at rallies to express their concern. That kind of visible, organized expression of shared values is how norms shift and how leaders are moved to act. But rallies don't speak the language of the professional class; LinkedIn does. And yet LinkedIn, the one platform where business and civic leaders actually pay attention, remained oddly quiet.

So a small group of like-minded professionals and I built something.

It's called We Are Alert. The initiative asks professionals to do one thing: add a WeAreAlert.org frame to their LinkedIn profile photo. No petition. No donation. No party affiliation. Just a visible signal, in the most professional context we inhabit, that we are paying attention.

The hardest part of building it wasn't technical. It was figuring out how to create something genuinely non-partisan in this uniquely polarized moment in American history.

I'll be transparent: our founding group’s political views are mostly left of center. We say that openly because we believe these principles belong to everyone, and because an initiative like this only means something if it grows beyond the people who started it. The We Are Alert statement takes deliberate care to avoid targeting any party, policy, or leader. We are not here to fight a partisan battle. We are here because democratic norms - honest leadership, equal application of the law, the peaceful transfer of power - are not liberal or conservative values. They are the foundation on which our democracy and prosperity are built.

The theory behind We Are Alert is simple: when enough professionals make their values visible in the spaces where their leaders actually pay attention, it shifts norms. The #MeToo movement showed what happens when silence breaks in professional spaces. The Business Roundtable's 2019 statement on stakeholder capitalism showed that when enough business leaders signal a shift in values, it changes the conversation. Visible, organized professional expression matters.

We are not naive about what a LinkedIn frame can and cannot do. It will not by itself restore democratic norms. But it can help break the silence that makes those norms easier to erode. It can signal to business and civic leaders that their employees, colleagues, constituents, and peers are paying attention. And it can create the kind of visible clustering that makes the concern impossible to ignore.

That is the modest but meaningful ambition of We Are Alert.

We launched last week at wearealert.org. The response so far has been what you'd expect from any early-stage civic initiative: a small but growing group of professionals willing to make their concern visible, and a much larger group who are interested but hesitating.

That hesitation is itself worth examining. It reflects something real about the professional culture we've built: one that has so thoroughly separated work from civic life that even the most basic expression of civic concern feels risky. We have normalized a silence that serves no one except those who benefit from it.

Democratic norms are not self-enforcing. They depend on enough people being willing to defend them: visibly, consistently, and in the spaces where it counts.

We are professionals from across the political spectrum who believe those norms are under serious threat. We choose not to be silent.

Stand with us. Be alert.

Gary Forman is a retired speechwriter, communications consultant, and creative director based in New York. He is a cofounder (with Lin Shearer) of We Are Alert, a non-partisan civic visibility initiative for professionals at wearealert.org.