A Monday Date.

It's been a tough week.

I've got blisters on my "unfollow" fingers; it was time to eliminate the social media "friends" who can't do any better than post one fabricated, lying, propaganda meme after another. This has included a few people for whom I feel genuine affection and consider to be friends in the real world, not the pretend on-line world. I understand that some of them are scared; others didn't have a strong grip when things were good. What's changed is my willingness to tolerate their blathering.

As K. stated so well, it's about my own sanity and survival. I usually could brush it off prior to COVID, but now these people no longer are just harmless loonies; they're advocating harm at every turn -- whether pandemic obliviousness, or white supremacy, or virulent superstition.

For all my reputation as an extremist, no one has persisted as long as I have in the effort to cling to a middle ground as it pertains to talking with people who hold differing beliefs. But they're becoming toxic zombies to me, and while I dislike having jettison dysfunctional ballast to protect myself, here we are.

Trump at Game 5: Live by the theatrical gesture, die by the theatrical gesture.

Reminiscent of John 3:16?

I'll remember the World Series as the first time in a long while that I rooted for a National League team. New York Yankees appearances are an exception, and in cases of a Dodgers-Yankees series, I wouldn't watch at all.

I've nothing whatever against the players, but I couldn't abide the Houston front office's tone-deaf response to assistant general manager Brandon Taubman's outbursts aimed at female reporters, which took place following the league championship series.

Seems Taubman outed himself as a douche bag -- albeit it explainable behavior for him given a former career on Wall Street -- and his superiors arrogantly flailed for days before belatedly mouthing platitudes absent sincerity about their comprehension of a changing world.

Around the game, shots of schadenfreude have been chased by I-told-you-so's. Contempt for the Astros runs deep -- and has well before this incident. Jealousy breeds some of it. The organization's arrogance accounts for the rest. The Astros painted themselves as a disrupter and reveled in the commotion. They lived with the perception that they didn't understand people. They fed their process, followed it with fealty, doubled down. They believed in it, and they never had much of a reason not to, not until a week ago, when the assistant GM high on the feeling of winning the pennant opened his mouth, and two days later, when Luhnow and the Astros forgot to abide by that essential principle that has guided them for so long: Bad information leads to bad decisions.

Spare the tears for Taubman. Before we know it he'll be back at an investment firm, screwing taxpayers.

 And the Trump scene at Game 5? Spew feces for a living, and you'd best expect to get feces spewed back at you.

I'm happy the Washington Nationals won; again, nothing against the Astros as players. Even apart from the Houston front office fiasco, witnessing a seven-game pro sports series in which the visiting team won all the games is something we're not likely to see repeated.

Take me out of this ball game at The Economist

Donald Trump’s embarrassing reception at the World Series was a defining moment of his presidency

As a rule of thumb, the more an American president is loved, the more baseball stories there are about him.

Although not Donald Trump.

He had not been to watch the Washington Nationals (the Senators’ successors) before this week. And though he was persuaded to go because the “Nats” were appearing in their first World Series, he was not invited to throw the first pitch. On what he might have expected to be his best day as commander-in-chief (he revealed the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hours earlier), he was hidden away in an executive suite. The Lerner family that owns the Nats did not want him sitting with them. And the one time he flashed up on the big screen the jeering of the crowd was thunderous. A chant of “Lock him up!” rippled round the stadium long after Mr Trump’s image was replaced by footage of smiling servicemen. “Veterans for impeachment” read a banner behind home plate.

The usual battle lines were drawn.

Mr Trump’s Republican defenders dismissed this indignity as mere swamp gurgling. “You can either be loved in dc and hated in America. Or you can be loved in America and hated in dc,” tweeted Congressman Jody Hice. But it signified much worse for the president and his party than a few thousand hostile bureaucrats.

The newspaper concludes ...

He is not the first president to be booed at a sporting event. Bill Clinton was jeered by a nascar crowd, George W. Bush and Barack Obama at baseball games. But veterans of those occasions (and there were several watching the Nats that night) considered the hatefulness of the response to Mr Trump qualitatively different. This should make conservatives even more worried. For years they have exaggerated the vindictiveness and radicalism of the left to mask the contradictions in their own camp. Yet Mr Trump’s divisiveness has turned this into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Charged with partisan grievance, many on the left want to scrap the electoral college, pack the courts—do whatever it takes to never again be tyrannised by an antediluvian minority. Conservatives may soon have more than the odd gay wedding cake to contend with.

And it already seems certain that the one baseball event Mr Trump will be associated with occurred at Nationals Park this week. Sport lifts people with a feeling of vicarious striving for perfection even when their team loses. And when it wins, as the Nationals ultimately did, bringing Washington its first World Series in almost a century, the memory never fades. This is why sport is so much more loved than politics. Immortalised in baseball history, Mr Trump’s humiliation this week will be remembered long after most of his administration’s scandals have faded into oblivion.

ON THE AVENUES: Donnie Blevins tells his story.

Donnie Blevins is a purposeful man with little time for wasted motions or words. He puts his brain into gear before putting his mouth into motion. Blevins’ personal page at Facebook is characteristically concise and to the point.

“I'm a Christian, a fair, honest and hard-working man.”

When Blevins was a child, disaster struck the family. One night he awoke to smoke and chaos. The bunk bed he shared with his twin brother caught fire, the spark from a faulty wall socket igniting the curtain and spreading flames to where the boys slept, unaware.

As Blevins’ father pulled his brother from the bottom bunk, his brother grasped Blevins’ hand to yank him down off the top. They made it outside and watched in shock as the house and all their possessions were reduced to smoldering debris within minutes, the blaze so intense there was nothing left except ashes when the fire department arrived.

“All I had on was my underwear,” Blevins recounts. “We didn’t have anything, and we didn’t have anywhere to go. We were homeless – no insurance, because dad was renting the house.”

Luckily their father’s boss from the sheet metal factory knew someone at the New Albany Public Housing Authority, and so the family found a place to stay. Even 45 years later, Blevins hasn’t forgotten this feeling of rootless vulnerability.

“I remember when we first got into the housing authority, mom and dad took us over to the old Lillian Emory School. Mom went inside to sign us up for first grade.

“But we didn’t know it was a school, and I remember me and my brother sitting in the car out in the parking lot, crying our eyes out.

“We thought it was an orphanage. We thought mom and dad couldn’t afford us. We still didn’t have any other clothes except the ones we had on. Mom finally came back outside and we drove off, and this made us feel a little better, so we asked her: ‘Why are you giving us away?’

“What are you talking about, giving you away? I’m putting you into school!”

At first the Blevins twins slept on the apartment floor atop a blanket. One day a neighbor gave the family a baby bed for their young sister, then other neighbors brought clothes. Someone donated a mattress for Blevins and his brother to use. “That floor sure was hard,” he says.

Slowly things got better. Blevins’ dad got a second job, and his mom found work, too. Only then could the family afford a babysitter at night to look after seven children. When the twins were in the fifth grade their parents had saved enough money to leave public housing and move to a home in Sellersburg.

When Blevins was 12 he got his first job working in a hay field for a Clark County farmer, then started cutting grass. At 16 he applied at his father’s workplace, where the minimum age for employment was 18. They hired him anyway. Other jobs followed, and after high school Blevins got on at the Sellersburg water company.

Blevins minces no words. “I never had any handouts,” he says. “No rich uncle, no rich grandpa. I had to work hard for everything I had.”

And he did. In 2000 Blevins accepted a position with the city of New Albany, eventually working in four different municipal departments: street, sanitation, stormwater and wastewater. He wanted to get more involved with his community and ran for an at-large city council seat in 2003, garnering the highest vote total among Democrats during the primary, then winning a council seat outright in the fall.

Blevins became one of eight Democrats on the council, with only a single Republican. One of his rookie council colleagues from the 2003 Democratic landslide was Jeff Gahan, the future mayor, who won the first of two consecutive 6th district council terms alongside Blevins, who says he had no significant disagreements with Gahan during this period.

Unfortunately the Democrat-dominated council was prone to internal factionalism, resulting in frequent four-versus-four power alignments. Blevins became an unlikely (and uneasy) swing vote among warring Democrats. His discomfort often was palpable. Seeking re-election in 2007, Blevins was defeated in the May primary and seemed almost relieved to be shedding a burden.

As always, Blevins got on with his life. He’d come a very long way from the scared little boy in underwear watching his family’s house burn to the ground. Blevins was a husband and a father with an unblemished record as a city employee. Conscientious and thoughtful, Blevins also served as pastor in his church (he still does).

What’s more, Blevins had a fledgling business to nurture. His NA City Boys Sanitation company began operations in February of 2006. Disillusioned by then-mayor James Garner’s privatization of the city’s sanitation department (Blevins was transferred from sanitation to the sewer utility and wasn’t part of the move to eventual sanitation contractor EcoTech), he started his own private sanitation company. It has been growing ever since.

“NA City Boys can’t do residential pick-up here in New Albany because of the city ordinance, but we can do commercial, and we can work in the fringe area in the county.”

From its inception NA City Boys has competed for contracts against EcoTech. Did this fact rub people the wrong way, and more importantly, was it ever an issue between Blevins and his fellow elected officials during the time of his council tenure?

He says no.

What about Gahan? Was there ever any friction with him?

“No,” says Blevins. “Jeff congratulated me (for starting NA City Boys), and nothing was negative, not at all.”

According to Blevins, neither he personally nor NA City Boys experienced problems during the remainder of Garner’s lone term or Doug England’s final mayoral stint. The entirely of Gahan’s first term passed uneventfully as well. Blevins’ city job and his side project remained separate, and life was good.

It all changed after the Democratic Party primary in 2015.

---

Businessman David White announced his candidacy for mayor of New Albany, challenging the incumbent Gahan. Blevins and White were good friends, having met for the first time in 2003 at a Democratic Party picnic. They hit it off, and naturally Blevins volunteered to help White with his campaign.

White lost in the primary and Gahan was re-elected. For Blevins, this was the end of it. It never occurred to him that helping a friend would result in retribution. However, the ramifications were immediate and irrevocable.

“After the primary election it went downhill fast,” he states.

The polls hadn’t been closed for long when Blevins felt an arctic breeze. He was cited for improper cell phone use by his street department supervisor, who left no doubt that this directive to “write up” Blevins came straight from the higher-ups.

Specifically, after ten years of peaceful co-existence, suddenly NA City Boys had become a problem. Was Blevins doing NA City Boys business by phone while on the city’s time clock?

“No I wasn’t,” he replies firmly. “Other guys used their phones for Facebook or to play games, but I only answered when my wife and kids called me. Then they said those were business calls -- but everyone knows you can’t run a business over the phone.”

The harassment became noticeable and quickly escalated.

Blevins had been parking NA City Boy trucks at his house since the company was founded, but suddenly in early 2016 he received a certified letter from the city referencing an ordinance against parking commercial vehicles on residential property. He chose not to fight the decree and began parking the company’s trucks at a commercial property he owned on South Street.

Then in the spring of 2017, while working to clean up flooding damage on the riverfront, Blevins was openly snubbed in front of witnesses by the second-in-command to flood control director Chris Gardner – the mayor’s son-in-law, who assumed the position in 2012 with no other qualifications than a university marketing degree.

Several city workers had been cleaning all morning, and when it came time to break for lunch everyone at the site had transportation except Blevins and one other employee. Blevins asked the flood control supervisor if he’d mind running them to the store.

“He told me, ‘Donnie, I can take anybody up to the store but you. Nothing personal.’ ”

The supervisor confided that Gardner had ordered him “not to do anything for Donnie,” and said he couldn’t help Blevins because he “didn’t want to get himself into trouble.”

According to Blevins, throughout 2016 and 2017 he received frequent hints from Gahan supporters that he was a pariah and needed to make amends. One such messenger was Terry Ginkins, owner of TA Ginkins Company, recently revealed by NA Confidential as one of Gahan’s most reliable pay-to-play campaign finance donors.

One day on a job site Ginkins arrived and sidled up to Blevins, making small talk before saying, “Donnie, you need to get on board with Gahan.”

Blevins adds that when Ginkins’ company was remodeling the firehouse at Community Park in 2017, street department employees were sent with heavy equipment to dig and install a drain – something already included in Ginkins’ bid, presumably saving the contractor money.

This rankled Blevins, then Ginkins paused one day to taunt Blevins about “getting behind” Gahan, boasting that “I (Ginkins) don’t have a problem with Jeff.”

This time Blevins didn’t hesitate.

“I don’t imagine you do, because Gahan built your company.”

Ginkins bristled. “What do you mean?”

Blevins told him: “You know exactly what I mean. You get all these handouts and jobs, get all that money and then kick some back.”

“He got really mad,” Blevins remembers, “and he said I had no right to say those things.”

Blevins bit his lip, thinking to himself: Terry, you and Jeff are two peas in a pod.

---

For Blevins the end came in February, 2018. He was working nights on snow removal, out on a run after 9:00 p.m., when Gahan made a visit to the street department office.

When Blevins returned, his supervisor called him inside to deliver the ultimatum he'd just been given. According to the supervisor, who said he had no idea why any of it was happening, Gahan had gone “berserk” about Blevins, referring to him as “that son-of-a-bitch” and promising to “fire his (Blevins’) ass the first chance I get.”

The supervisor, himself nearing full retirement, was shaken by the mayor’s attitude. He also was determined to look out for number one, interpreting Gahan’s obscenity-laden tantrum as a clear warning to Blevins to get out while the getting was good – or the supervisor would do as needed to protect himself.

Weary of mistreatment, Blevins did just that, opting to avoid the looming ax by opting for early retirement at a sizable disadvantage in terms of potential retirement benefits.

"I needed to retire because I was going to lose my job. I told him go ahead, schedule my days, and that's when I started taking my vacation and sick time."

At 50 years old with 19 years in, Blevins needed another 10 years for a full pension, so the ordeal ended up costing him 75% of his optimum monthly pension check. Thanks to his union membership Blevins kept his health insurance, although his monthly insurance premium now costs 50% more than the benefit check.

It’s a very good thing Blevins retained the health insurance.

Tragedy struck a few months ago when his wife suffered a massive stroke.* She remains comatose. Blevins brought her home after a stint at a nursing facility, and how his primary job is caring for her, devoting himself to his stricken wife’s needs as his adult sons manage NA City Boys in his absence.

Gahan? Characteristically, he isn’t finished yet.

Six weeks ago Blevins received another certified letter from the same city functionary, this time citing a vague complaint from an unnamed neighbor about truck noise in the morning, and ordering NA City Boys to cease and desist. There’s a machine shop opposite Blevins’ commercial property, with other industrial users nearby.

There’s also a church where a chief political ally of Gahan’s preaches.

In spite of it all, Blevins tells his story calmly and factually, betraying no outward signs of anger, bitterness or self-pity. He concedes there are times when it’s hard being a Christian and maintaining his composure. But as has always been the case with Blevins, there’s plenty of work to do, and he just does it.

Blevins’ own conclusion about Jeff Gahan is sweeping and comprehensive in its brevity.

“Jeff is a bully.”

---

* An update: Carmen Blevins died on August 18, 2019. 

---

Recent columns:

March 26: ON THE AVENUES: Gahan's hoarding of power and money is a threat to New Albany's future.

March 19: ON THE AVENUES: In 1989, six months of traveling fabulously in Europe.

March 12: ON THE AVENUES: Tender mercies, or why Democratic Party luminaries didn't want to be seen at the "Protect Hoosiers from Hate" rally.

March 5: ON THE AVENUES: Prom planning's nice and all, but New Albany still needs an autonomous independent business alliance.

Have you been threatened or harassed by Mayor Jeff Gahan or someone in his inner circle? Let's talk about it.

Have you been threatened or harassed by Mayor Gahan or someone in his inner circle?

If so, I need to speak with you. I'd like to hear your story, and moreover I'd like to write your story and tell your story -- understandably, given the likelihood of reprisals, your anonymity is assured.

It's an election year and Team Gahan will spend the following months hoisting numerous pictures of bright, shiny objects. These will be accompanied by glowing words of boilerplate written to a template stolen from big league Democrats by unctuous sycophants like Adam 'Tricky" Dickey.

Team Gahan won't mention hidden costs or the extent to which the mayor's cult of personality is taxpayer-funded. They will say nothing of the pay-to-play patronage system that funnels tens of thousands of dollars into the campaign finance account.

Most importantly, they'll say nothing about Gahan's persistent abuse of living, breathing human beings, depicting him as a benevolent "little father" to all childlike New Albanians.

Many of you know better. Your stories need to be heard so we can begin to demolish Jeff Gahan's personality cult, one fabrication at a time. Folks, the emperor's new clothes are little more than press releases he commissions, then believes.

Thanks. I look forward to hearing your side of the story.

It's a Christmas miracle -- though when it comes to Bill Allen's shit hole properties on Main Street, even Santa knows better than to dream.

This morning there was some sort of clean-up operation underway in the outdoor cockroach dining area of notorious slumlord attorney Bill Allen's collection of neglected properties on the corner of Main and 3rd. It seems a shame to make all the rats homeless for the holidays, but when it comes to this collection of purposeful dilapidation, any news is good news.

What a community parasite.

If I were ordinance enforcement, I'd follow the wagon to make sure the contents aren't dumped illegally on the side of the road -- or at one of Allen's other trashy buildings.

But he sure has a nice house up in Silver Hills, eh?

It's forever noteworthy the way that none of Allen's residential neighbors (including Floyd County Prosecutor Keith Henderson) would tolerate squalor in their neighborhood the magnitude of which has been allowed by Allen at his Main & 3rd dump.

Bill Allen, if you're reading ... nah, there's no need to say it aloud.

On our mayoral candidates and 1Si's attempted usurpation of the local political process.

New Albany First, the city’s first-ever grassroots, local and independent business alliance, held an information session last evening at the Public House, and among the participants were mayoral candidates DM Bagshaw (Republican) and Jack Messer (Independent).

Jeff Gahan (Democrat) was not in attendance, but he has been a supporter of NA 1st from the very start. Also absent was Thomas Keister (Libertarian).

I was hoping Keister would attend, so I could jokingly ask him about his Free Rein Media, which someone masquerading as “Jimmy” recently took to task in One Southern Indiana Pop-Up Newspaper (OSIPUN, an acronym which looks almost “insipid”) for selling items designed to draw fire from Reclaim Our Redneck Backwoods Superstitious Culture Kentuckiana (RORBSCK, which lacks only a “u” to suck out loud, and surely already does).

But, as is my habit, I digress.

Significantly, all four candidates are small business owners, and even more interestingly, both Bagshaw and Messer were willing to report bits and pieces of the interview process wherein One Southern Indiana’s (1Si) political aggrandizement arm asked them questions to see who merits political endorsements, ones calculated to obtain oligarchic orgasms at the highly likely ultimate cost of sacrificing voluntary funding from every last locally elected governmental body able to grasp that taxpayers of virtually every political stripe earnestly wish for entities like 1Si to keep the politics out of whatever it is the organization does to justify its existence – itself a debatable topic.

According to both Bagshaw and Messer, one question asked of them was if elected, whether they would “use” 1Si’s services for outsourcing their economic development tasks. Both candidates indicated they responded with wariness, if not outright hostility. It is rumored that Gahan was more vociferous in objecting to 1Si’s arrogance. Having read Keister’s blogs over the years, I’d expect the same from him. None of the four seem to be buying into 1Si’s errant shtick, and for this, we should be grateful.

It makes me guardedly optimistic to know that first and foremost, our mayoral candidates understand small business issues by virtue of being small businessmen themselves.

Furthermore, not one of them is eager to be co-opted by One Southern Indiana’s creeping and unnecessary interference in the political process, and in this, each candidate lies firmly on the side not only of the general public, but an ever-increasing number of 1Si’s own operatives, who see quite clearly that the Stemlerization (that’s a synonym for politicization, folks) of 1Si impedes whatever legitimacy lies in their daily work. They can’t say it aloud, but readers would be amazed to hear the chilling off-record comments.

In fact, 1Si is so squarely on the defensive owing to its leadership’s perpetual, self-defeating political missteps that it cannot even run the risk of linking its new, vaunted Think Local Southern Indiana diversionary tactic to 1Si, which founded it. Nowhere is the 1Si brand to be seen, which of course does little except deepen the depth of deception.

All of which, to me, seems curiously toxic in nature.

ON THE AVENUES: There’s enough toxicity and naysaying to go around.

ON THE AVENUES: There’s enough toxicity and naysaying to go around.

By ROGER BAYLOR
Local Columnist

Let’s conjecture for a moment.

Early one morning, over inky espresso and delightfully smoky kippers, you delve with appropriate trepidation into the moldering remnants of the once mighty Louisville Courier-Journal, and soon find this quote in a Dale Moss column on downtown New Albany’s ongoing revitalization effort.

“We're just keeping the naysayers in check.”

All things considered, Dale’s article last week was appreciated. It offered a balanced perspective, with chosen interviewees expressing qualified positives, and also pointed to what remains to be done. Revitalization was characterized as fragile and only 50% complete, an assessment that might be overly optimistic.

But a full week later, I continue to be struck by the interviewee’s linkage of achievement with keeping “naysayers in check,” prompting me to consider exactly who the naysayers are in this context. There was a time when the identity of the naysayers seemed axiomatic to me.

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.

I wrote these words in 2009, with the Potty Police, Citizens Faux Accountability and Freedom to Screech in mind, although similar sentiments would have been just as valid if expressed at any time since the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. When it comes to modern times, New Albany has been a world capital of naysaying since before times were modern.

---

All those wasted years! A city steadily denuded of youthful vigor, with creativity dipping toward a palpable nadir, and the extractive logic of the exurb at its zenith, opting for decay management as the political and cultural order of the day, as epitomized by the flight of the educated and the reign of the slumlord.

Lacking any constructive platform for reform, New Albany’s civic inferiority complex was stoked to fever pitch amid the anguished wails of those stuck irrevocably in the past, watching angrily as the modern world eroded their eternally unbuttressed claims of privilege, and defining themselves solely by their tax rates to the exclusion of any deeper conception of morality or citizenship.

Lately, I’ve found myself skipping through a looking glass, seemingly occupying space outside the ranks of two oppositional local worldviews. To illustrate this directional point with a spectrum, as opposed to speculum, consider a familiar national example.

Virtually all Republicans approaching life from the “right” (even if it seldom is) currently oppose Barack Obama in knee-jerk uniformity, although “goose-step” is a more accurate descriptor of their body language.

Meanwhile, Obama’s descent to the depths of the center has satisfied few and accomplished little, save for alienating the Democratic Party’s leftist cadres. Their annoyance with the POTUS can be termed as (loyal?) opposition from the left, although it is difficult to imagine them abandoning Obama entirely given the nature of the fascistic threat from the right.

---

In like fashion, the tendency of New Albany and Floyd County “conservative” right-wingers, including most Republicans as well as a majority of so-called Democrats, to support positions designed to starve civil/secular society until its emaciated frame can be drowned in Grover Norquist’s bathtub and replaced with patriotic superstition, all but ensures my consistent opposition from the left.

But merely opposing the right from the left does not situate me in the center. In recent months, I find myself well to the left of those nominally opposing the traditional rightist naysayers, with the predictable result of opprobrium being heaped squarely upon me.

In fact, some agitated observers have included me among the naysaying opposition when it comes to the holy crusade that is downtown revitalization, primarily owing to my genetic inability to slavishly adhere to their scriptural pablum.

Hence those strange charges of “toxicity,” and of letting the side down by asking far too many questions of the small cadre that fancies itself as leading the charge – but, you see, it is the very fact of this cadre’s small size, over-representation, aspirations toward monopolistic decision-making and periodic dullness of wit which makes my questions necessary.

Consider this: If I’m somehow naysaying from my isolated perch on the far left, how are we to characterize the bizarre pronouncements of right-leaning “centrist” councilman Bob Caesar? After all, when facing hard facts about the advantages of two-way traffic downtown, he accused me of anti-establishment tendencies (remember, we’re talking about traffic patterns, not marijuana legalization), and dismissed modernity with instinctive New Albanian disdain.

In other words, it (two way traffic) just can’t be done here – and I'm a fool to even try.

I’m told by certain youthful conciliators, whom I appreciate, that details do not matter, seeing as we’re all pursuing the same future goals, and yet for the skeptic in me, it is greater transparency, not less – it is more shareholders, not fewer – that produces confidence in the thematic togetherness being espoused.

I continue to believe that “we” can get it done, insofar as “we” is defined in as wide a participatory sense as possible. Conversely, supposedly shared goals are not being furthered by the emerging tendency to populate the darkened edifices of planning and decision-making with the very same people, again and again, over and over.

This is not the way to be inclusive, or to garner a multiplicity of viewpoints, or to ensure that new ways of thinking are brought to the table, and hence it hardly can be termed naysaying to point to it and ask: “Why?”

New Albany could be a veritable laboratory for out-of the-box, new ways of dealing with old problems, but one must break eggs to make omelets, and this seems abhorrent to the blindfolded centrists. It doesn’t surprise me to see the right’s selfish, tea party-besotted heels dug into the floodplain, but it’s tragic that others seem determined to emulate the right’s bad tactics to perpetuate the tiredness of their own outdated writ, and to discredit those who advocate a more dispersed method of calculating the city’s needs.

Maybe more people would become involved if they felt there was a chance of their voices being heard. As always, the solution is transparency, inclusivity and a willingness to shift a paradigm even if it gives the genuine naysayers heartburn.

Toxicity: In a nutshell, here is the case against me.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the case against the NA Confidential blog and its authors (primarily, me) is clear and persuasive, or so a correspondent earlier this week would have us believe. Admittedly, the charges are grave. Do they have merit?

In the interests of a certain neutrality of presentation, I am omitting mention of the specific episode seemingly prompting this correspondence, and while the following citations are listed out of chronological order, I’ve done nothing to edit them or diminish their impact. In a nutshell, here is the case against me.

"(Roger is fostering) a culture of negativity and community dissent bred through loaded discourse ... (this is) negative and tearing down others’ committed and well intentioned acts.

"Facts are distorted, reputations are sullied, and some of the authors are projecting their beliefs on other people's actions, like the conspiracies imagined and connected to every good work/project.

"When folks attempt to try and do something toward community betterment (they) are raked over the coals for doing so.

"(What is missing) is an effort on (Roger’s) part to be a part of the solution, to offer input on problem-solving on some of these issues. Why not take the time to call and have some dialogue and understand … instead, public criticism through the blog becomes your bully pulpit.

"(These words will) be distorted and predictably used as further fodder for your destructive antics.

"Many folks have told me that they refuse to patronize your business because of your condescending tactics and negativity.

"See how toxic your approach can be."

And so, the prosecution rests.

Is there even hope of a defense?

Discuss.