REWIND: It shan’t happen here (2009).

New Albany's civic inferiority complex is the subject of this, another of my Tribune columns. It was originally published on March 12, 2009.

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BEER MONEY: It shan’t happen here.

By ROGER BAYLOR Local Columnist

To live in New Albany is to be compelled forever and always to look at positive developments with a shrug, knowing that local Limbaughs are praying for failure, and to listen to their self-flagellating admonitions of futility, powerlessness and begrudgery:

It just can’t be done here – and you’re a fool to even try.

Which ideas and activities do the naysayers advise us to shun? Virtually all of them, especially any that suggest a departure from established thought and practice, even if it can be demonstrated that the “way we’ve always done it” never worked.

You name it, and it has been rejected as impossible in New Albany. From electrification and internal combustion engines in days past, to ordinance enforcement and restoring two-way streets in the present age, reality-based forward thinking always has been derided as completely unattainable.

Usually the excuse for inaction is the city’s lack of cash, but the malaise extends far deeper into the tortured psyche of the citizenry. Ours is an inferiority complex of epic dimensions, and outlanders discern it immediately upon entering the city limits, yet because these widespread feelings of inadequacy constitute a known devil, ruinous conservatism compels people to hug the ground and wait for impending change to cease before rising to scurry to previous dysfunctional patterns.

But the world continues to rotate and calendar pages inexorably turn, with or without New Albany’s assent, leaving the city’s enlightened elements to struggle against the dreary shackles of habitual humbuggery as they seek freedom from the fear-crazed nooses of the little people, whose contradictions are legion.

Is it rational to insist that we are citizens of the greatest country on the face of the earth, purportedly a place where opportunity is unlimited, but at the very same time, to assert entirely different rules for New Albany, thus dooming us to suffer through ignorance, squalor and underachievement as though we’re being gleefully punished by one of those celestial deities that folks hereabouts so eagerly accept?

I don’t buy it, and neither should you.

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Given my outspokenness on this topic, dissent is inevitable, and I’ve heard the vague rumblings. These might be enough to induce paranoia into the bloodstream of this opinionated barfly, but since the market on New Albanian paranoia is fully sated in the 1st council district alone, I shall continue to walk through the valley of the shadow of the alley between my Bank Street Brewhouse and Connor’s Place without fearing evil – or anonymous e-mails, or even spilled, bitter Coffey.

Ten weeks into this experiment in constructive agitation, the objections can be distilled to this essence:

“Roger, why do you hate New Albany so much?”

Let me try to count the ways that this accusation makes even less sense than the usual opinions seeking to pass muster as facts in a place that seldom values the distinctions between the two.

I hate New Albany so much that it has been my conscious choice to live here since descending the Knobs in 1994, later moving into a century-old house downtown with my wife in 2003, and all along resisting the common local impulse to transform the house into a quadplex rental unit while disingenuously denying that rental property is a business activity.

I hate New Albany so much that I’ve been working here in one or another capacity since 1983, becoming a business owner myself, and spending the past four years studying urban revitalization, networking with the like minded, and devising a business plan for an expansion of our brewing business into downtown – even though there were opportunities as good elsewhere.

I hate New Albany so much that I remain sanguine about the prospects of forging pacts of unity with fellow progressives, and doing my little bit to transform this city into a viable, marketable, modern component of the Louisville metro area.

Sorry to dash those preconceived notions, but I don’t hate New Albany.

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However, with our longstanding civic inferiority complex looming over us like an 800-pound pigeon perched on the Elsby Building, New Albany’s populace certainly seems to hate itself. Why does it conduct itself in such a self-loathing way?

Perhaps because so many of the ward heelers we elect to local office provide living, daily proof of the old axiom, “Insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Too many New Albanian politicians persist in greeting the wide world around them with fear and incomprehension, trumpeting their confusion as bequeathed to them by birthright, citing their own shortcomings as proof that the world cannot be changed or even modified, and spending their political careers excusing futility and failure.

Not to single out my 3rd district councilman, but where else do you hear campaign slogans like this:

It just can’t be done here – and you’re a fool to even trying.

And yet the citizens of New Albany vote for those proud of being incapable. The same people vote for the similarly incapable further up the Indiana governmental food chain, those who insist that local government must do more with less than ever before?

I won’t point a finger at government, because we get exactly the quality of government we deserve. If we hate ourselves and vote for others who do, too, then there’s only one place to look for the real answer: Pogo, who knew the truth.

The enemy (still) is us.