New Albany still needs an autonomous independent business alliance

The following text was published at NA Confidential on 5 March 2019. The pandemic came to New Albany a year later, followed by endless Sherman Minton Bridge repairs and Main Street beautification upheavals, combining to burden independent downtown business owners with incredibly challenging conditions for their very survival. There are no easy answers given that local leaders espousing the Gahan personality cult seem to have forgotten the physician’s imperative of “first, do no harm.” But one thing is clear to me. Independent business owners simply cannot passively permit their well-being to be defined by government officials and goverment-sanctioned groups; even if all of them were perfectly well-intentioned (spoiler alert: they’re not), they couldn’t know what it means to operate your business, and they cannot (or will not) understand their complicity to inflict pain. Their priorities are different, and involve their self-perpetuation first and foremost, not yours. A few details might have been altered, but I’m standing by these words from 2019. The essay has been lightly edited to correct mistakes I ......Read more