The Walnut Tree

         When I was a small child my family lived in Sharpsville in northern Tipton County. There was a big walnut tree in the backyard. To this day the smell of green walnuts is evocative to me. It’s not really a nice smell at all, rather pungent, but it triggers memories of my childhood. 

         I like to pick up a green one, rub the skin gently, then take a big whiff. It’s one of those smells – like freshly ground coffee or the entrance to a tobacco shop, that only provides maximum, intoxicating impact on the first whiff. All repeated attempts to enjoy that smell fade to the point of futility. Time must pass between such intense aromas before recapturing the initial burst, as if our olfactories need to air out and take a rest between such jolts.

         On a summer day more than forty-five years ago the old train station downtown was being demolished. My brother and sisters had been pestering my Dad for a tree house. He suggested we go down with the wagon and ask the workmen for some scrap boards.

         We came home with the wagon stacked high with old woodwork and rough sawn two-by-fours. With them, my father built a tree house in the walnut tree. Looking back now I can see that it was a terribly dangerous arrangement. Wouldn’t be allowed today. Still, nobody ever got hurt.

         We could see our entire world from up there. There was a basketball court against the garage, not paved, just dirt. Beside that was a gnarled, aging apple tree. There were old names carved in the bark and we, too, carved our initials there with a roofing knife. There was a large sandbox along a fence that separated the backyard from the gravel driveway and a big garden that lay just beyond the reach of the shadow of the tree branches. There was also a long row of forsythias along the fence - great for making instant green roses – and whips. We were at the very edge of town. Beyond the road to the west (where I learned to ride a bike) was a barn and a field where cattle grazed, across the road to the north was a soybean field.

         My brother and sisters and I did such terrible things when we were kids. If my own children ever did the same things we’d have rushed them off to therapy. We shot each other with BB guns, got in vicious fights and experimented with cigarettes behind the garage. Our family had taken a trip to California in the summer of ’67 – in a day when the airlines put mini-packs of cigarettes on your food tray (yes, they served everyone a meal). My sister and I gathered all those little packs and brought them home and gave them a try behind the garage. You could have seen what we were up to from the tree house in the old walnut. Of course we got caught. There were spankings and groundings - it was a dark day.

        Whenever I smell green walnuts, I think of that.

         I found a little puppy and brought it home and begged my mother to let me keep it. It only lasted a few weeks. I remember standing beneath the tree one day, filling a bucket with walnuts as my mother often forced us to do. My brother, Tom, came around the house and sneered, “Your dog just got hit by a car. It’s your fault because you never take care of it.” I dropped my bucket and ran around the house. Sure enough, there was Poochy laying along the curb - dead and bloody. I laid him on a brown paper sack and carried him to the doghouse under the walnut tree. When my dad came home from work he dug a hole and buried the dog in the garden. I built a little grave marker out of sticks. You could have watched all this unfold from the planks of the tree house.

         Oh, the trials of childhood.

         After a winter season, the walnut husks turn from Kermit-The-Frog-green to rotten-banana brown, and the layer beneath congeals into a black goo, as thick and staining as used motor oil. At this point they were gathered with gardening gloves. When that dries and falls off, you’re left with the nut we all recognize as a walnut. One warm, late spring day, my sister, Jama gathered those walnuts fallen the previous autumn from the garden and along the neighbor’s chain link fence. Each had a 2” or 3” sprout of a walnut tree popping out of the nut. She filled the wagon and went door-to-door selling walnut trees to the neighbors for a dollar.

         We moved from that house when I was eight. I remember being quite happy there. It seems that money was tight and we lived with few frills. We moved to a bigger, nicer house in a bigger, nicer town and our lives seemed suddenly very different – less wild. When I think of that house in Sharpsville I see the layout in my mind from the lofty perspective of the tree house in the walnut tree. It was a hideout when we played war, a base for hide and seek and shade when we shucked sweet corn.
         Many years later, when my own kids were small, I bought a rental property on Logan Street here in Noblesville. At the back near the alley was a huge walnut tree. I took my boys with me when I did yard work. In the autumn when I mowed, I gave them each a bucket and made them pick up walnuts. As children often do, my boys mimicked me. Sometimes when I picked up a green walnut, they would do the same. They gouged the felt-like skin with a fingernail or rubbed it on the concrete and then held it against their noses for a big whiff.
         But the smell did not mean the same thing to them that it meant to me.

My new book, The Salvage Man began going online for e-readers before Christmas. It's currently available at iTunes, Amazon.com, Fastpencil, and BarnesandNoble.com. I'll be doing a public launch to tell the world in the weeks ahead - probably throw a party at my house with hardcover versions available.

The Salvage Man

cover design by Sarah Kate Chamness

I've just published my 2nd book. It's called The Salvage Man.

The Salvage Man is the story of Dan Reynolds, a man who’s become invisible in a place where he thought he’d live a life of purpose, where he thought he’d matter. In a startling moment of terror and wonder, he meets another soul as invisible as he is.  Together, they seek redemption.

Dan’s story was born in my imagination in 1994.

In the early morning dark, driving down Cherry Street to my out-of-town teaching job, I found myself behind a slow moving city truck, pulling a magnet that hung an inch above the street, gathering nails dumped by union workers to harass scabs. Noblesville’s biggest employer, Firestone, was trying to bust the union, which in return was striking. The union-busting, picket-line crossing, slow-motion destruction of those jobs happened just blocks from my home. The plight of those workers weighed on my mind.

When I moved to Noblesville in the late ‘80s, the population was 18,000. Growth had already changed the town. Many of those Firestone workers had grown up in a different Noblesville. As the years passed I met blue-collar workers my age who grew up in a town they thought would be 10-15,000 people, where they’d have jobs of a certain kind and would fit in socially in the life of the town. But even in the late ‘80s it was changing rapidly, and by the mid ‘90s, that world was evaporating.

That growth and those new suburban residents created an economic vitality that obscured the fading of blue-collar Noblesville. But I saw it on my way to work every morning. For the writer in me, that became Dan Reynolds background.

During the same period my little family was living in an old house I was restoring just down the street from that strike. We were surviving on my teacher’s salary. I took to dumpster diving for old house parts at demolition sites and salvaging old houses prior to demolition. It helped restore my home and provided extra cash as I sold truckloads to antique salvage yards.

Once I went with a neighbor, Russ Wagoner, to salvage century-old cut stone steps from a neglected farmstead west of town. It was being demolished to make way for the new Mill Grove subdivision. The 1870s Italianate farmhouse had already partially collapsed, leaning to one side like a Dr. Seuss cartoon house, but one could have still slipped in a window to grab a door or fireplace mantel. Russ had been in there already. Digging around the five-foot long stones that hot sunny day, I asked if there was anything inside worth taking. Russ is not a foolish man, not prone to mysticism, but he gravely said, “Something bad happened in there. You can feel it. Don’t go in.” The cold insistence in his eyes convinced me. I peered into a back window at the fractured kitchen, but otherwise took his advice. We muscled the stone steps into my pickup and left.

The old Cottingham farmhouse, where The Salvage Man is set.

I salvaged again at a picturesque farmstead at the north end of 10^th Street, across from Potter’s Bridge. In my new position as a Realtor and the president of the local preservation group, I’d convinced the developer to save the pre-Civil War home, but the barn, the grain bin, the milk house and carriage house, shaded by towering trees in an overgrown courtyard-like setting, were all being demolished to make way for the Potter’s Woods subdivision. I felt a deep sadness as I gathered doors, porch posts and shutters that had been discarded in the barn loft. The next week when I went back to dig through old books and personal belongings stacked in the grain bin, I arrived to find a staggering mountain of dirt had been moved, making a twenty foot deep dry mote around the barn, which now seemed to float on an island. It was a bizarre scene. Eventually the barn would be demolished and the ground beneath it also moved to make the subdivision’s retention pond.

It was there on that farmstead that I set the story of the Salvage Man, there that I imagined Dan Reynolds doing the same work I was doing, but he did it to financially survive after the strike. And like the old farmhouse Russ had entered only to feel a rising sense of unease, this farmhouse had an ominous feeling inside; dense, stale air, and dark rooms and recesses that put a tingle at the back of your neck and filled your chest with an adrenaline-spiked urge to get out fast.

It is there inside that house, in that barn, and on that land that Dan Reynolds life changes.

I imagined Dan not only challenged by the end of his factory job, but divorced at age 50, his kids gone or in college. All the things that once defined this silent, emotionless man – job, marriage, parenthood – are all gone. And his hometown is increasingly unrecognizable from the place where he was raised. To make him feel even shittier, the lone way he finds to survive is to “undress,” as Dan puts it, the town’s historic identity, to be sold off at antique stores before it’s demolished.

But there in that house, in that barn, and on that land, Dan finds redemption.

I hope you’ll buy a copy of the book and discover the story for yourself. Copies can be bought for e-readers at iTunes, Barnes&noble.com, or Amazon.com. Barnes & Noble and the Amazon site can also sell print version for mail delivery. I’ll have hardcopy versions available in a few stores in Noblesville. Please encourage your friends to check it out.

For My Father

My father died 10 days before Christmas. I wrote the comments I wanted to share, read them at the service, then kinda put them out of my thoughts. I'd shared them with my friend Rhonda and promptly forgot about that, too. Yesterday she and I got to texting about silly epitaphs to have on your gravestone (I'd suggested "She was sweet and stupid" for her – which is only half true, after she texted me the comment "Hakuna Matata!"). She eventually sent this text:

"I told Georgie (Rhonda's daughter) last night that when I die, if you were still alive to look you up and have you help her with my eulogy. I read her yours for your dad and she was so impressed. She loved it! Should make you feel good. She hates everything:)"

So here's the eulogy I wrote for my dad. If it's good enough for Georgie, I suppose it's good enough for a Contrarian post.

Last Sunday I lost the best drywall man I've ever known. That he could level the horrifically out of level ceiling of a 120-year-old house before applying new drywall amazed me. I always wanted the job to go faster, but he’d slow me down and show me how to do it right.

I also lost the best electrician I ever hired. And even though I only paid him with a ham sandwich and a can of Old Milwaukee, he'd draw careful wire diagrams of the 3-way switches so I'd understand how they worked, and show me which spots in the electrical box would make the lights come on, and which spots would electrocute me.

I also lost an amazing plumber, who tolerated that I didn't want new fixtures, I wanted to make the 1920s fixtures work like new. Though exasperated, he rolled his eyes and helped me anyway.

My first-class carpenter also passed away last Sunday, along with the roofer who taught me how to lay shingles and the handyman who showed me how to hang gutters.

My go-to mortgage lender died on Sunday as well. He could always be counted on to make the loan. He'd have a payment book and keep careful records with each payment I made.

And my auto repairman died as well. He could take a lawn mower engine apart, put it back together, and rebuild a car’s brakes or transmission.

All these guys I lost were in fact one man: My father.

And those talents only scratch the surface of the things he taught me. I grew up in a house where men cleaned and cooked. It wasn’t just a job for women. It wasn’t common for his generation, but it was the way he was raised, and so became the way I was raised.

He had a deep love of music, That rubbed off on me. I recall as a teenager watching a TV show with him of old video clips of County Basie, Lena Horn and Nat King Cole. I told him I didn’t like that music. He shook his head in disgust. I eventually leaned to love that music.

When I had kids of my own, he regularly pitched in and tended to them like the Eagle Scout he once was, taking them to the woods and the creeks and the ponds.

That engineer, that handyman, that jack of all trades – he was good at a lot of things, but he wasn't very good at saying, "I love you." Those just weren’t easy words for him. But he was saying it all the time in acts of service to me. He said I love you with a hammer and with wire splitters. He said it with a pipe wrench and a drywall knife. He said it with a loan and said it again by making sure I paid it back. He said it by nurturing my children.

My father, Jim Meyer, with my sister Jama.

All those projects he used to help me with, I’ve done them on my own now for years, ever since he slowed down and the helping got harder.

A few years back I was telling him about a project I was working on. I could see in his eyes how he wished he could help. He said in frustration, “I’m not much good for anything anymore.”

But that handyman was good for an awful lot. I wouldn’t have known how to do most of what I’ve done, if he hadn’t repeatedly told me that he love me in the only way he knew how to say it.


My new book, The Salvage Man began going online for e-readers before Christmas. It's currently available at iTunes, Amazon.com, Fastpencil, and BarnesandNoble.com. I'll be doing a public launch to tell the world in the weeks ahead - probably throw a party at my house with hardcover versions available.

“If you haven’t got anything good to say . . .”

On the way home from a dinner gathering at a friend’s house that got a little loud and bawdy, I recalled my favorite dinner party story.

Winston Churchill

It was the famous incident between Winston Churchill and Lady Astor. The two sat side by side at a dinner party and throughout the evening Churchill was his usual self, telling off-color jokes and using foul language. Finally, an indignant Lady Astor spouted, “Sir, if you were my husband, I’d poison you.”  To which Churchill replied, “And Lady, if you were my wife, I’d drink it.”

I love Churchill.

Sometimes in life, we’re stuck beside both kinds of people at public affairs – sometimes the Lady Astors of the world, and sometimes the Churchills.

Years back, while channel surfing late at night, I stopped for a moment at the Howard Stern show. It amounted to a video feed of his radio show, which is absolute trash. I’d watch a minute or two before, much the way a rubber-necker ogles a car accident – you don’t really want to be a part of it, but a voyeuristic peek won’t hurt, right?

The premise is this: Stern invites a well-endowed young woman – model, actress, minor celebrity, whatever – to come on the show. He quizzes her about her love life – but not in an intelligent way, instead, the way a drunken frat boy on spring break might chat up a call girl on a street corner. The whole point is to get the guest to take her clothes off. In other words, the Howard Stern show is the intellectual equivalent of a teenage boy’s sex fantasy, with a good sound stage. I don’t know which is more pathetic, the aging host who still thinks this is the height of comedy, or the guest who thinks if she undresses it might further her acting/modeling career.

And just so you know, I wasn’t waiting for the payoff, because this was basic cable. All you see is a woman with scrambled pixels over her chest.

I recall once channel surfing from Stern and immediately finding myself in an alternate world of idiots: Pat Robertson’s 700 Club. I’d gone from a pompous egomaniac to a delusional egomaniac. Pat was blathering on, comparing liberals to Nazis and insisting that if Disney didn’t turn away from its gay-friendly policies, God would send a hurricane to destroy Orlando (I’m not making this shit up).

On the 700 Club Pat Robertson pretends to read the news while spinning each story in a way to canonize the Christian-conservative point of view while vilifying any point of view that might have been considered progressive at any point during the past century and a half.

Pat Robertson: I love this picture!

In short hand – guns are always good, homosexuals are always bad, reinstating mandatory prayer in school would solve most of America’s problems, poor women will keep having babies if you keep giving them welfare, and September 11^th was proof that America is so sinful, God couldn’t be bothered to protect us.

For me, the involuntary vomiting reflex is triggered as quickly by Robertson as it is by Stern.

But, there was talk of dinner parties at the beginning of this ramble.

Let’s say you’re in purgatory - stuck at a dinner party - they’re seating people - Pat Robertson is on one end of the long banquet table and Howard Stern at the other. The seats in the middle are taken by the intelligent and reasonable people you would prefer to sit with. But, you must sit at one end or the other. Which end would you choose?

In truth, there’s a little of both men in me. I’ve offended my fair share of people with bawdy conversation and rude jokes and throwing conversational hand grenades. And there’s a childish side of me that likes to shock people (especially the Pat Robertson kind of people).

There’s also a part of me - the parent and former-teacher side that discouraged teenagers from pre-marital sex, alcohol and drugs. As a high school teacher I frowned at 16 years of potty and sex humor, not because it was my job, but because often it’s simply not funny, just childish. Howard Stern is proof that the dimmer the brain, the older you get before you stop laughing at that stuff.

But I have to admit, at the dinner party, I wanna sit next to Stern. That’s where the most interesting conversation is gonna take place. And there are plenty of other historical figures I’d choose. And if I could combine the wit with the crude, that’s my preference. If I could go back in time, I’d sit my ass right next to Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt.

Longworth cared little for social convention and once said, “If you haven’t got anything good to say about anybody, come sit next to me.”

Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth

In her late teens at the turn of the 20^th Century, while her father was the U.S. president, she smoked cigarettes, went out unchaperoned with men, stayed out late partying, and kept a pet snake. She looked like a Gibson Girl, but didn’t act like one.

She had a rude wit, once saying of her attention-whore presidential father, "He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening."

Of a senator having an affair with a woman less than half his age, she snorted, "You can't make a soufflé rise twice."

When I’m led through the gates of hell, sit me next to Winston Churchill, Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth, and if there’s no other seat, yes, I'll sit with Howard Stern. But if it’s truly hell, my little personal hell will probably be a private room with the disapproving Lady Astor and Pat Robertson.

My propensity to choose the rude over the prude rubbed off on my children. Once when telling the story of Winston Churchill and Lady Astor to my kids, my14 year old daughter, Sally, replied, “Did you say, ‘Lady Ass-turd?’”

I hung my head in despair a moment, and then laughed really, really hard.

And, oh yeah, at any dinner party, set me next to Sally.

My new book, The Salvage Man began going online for e-readers before Christmas. It's currently available at iTunes, Amazon.com, Fastpencil, and BarnesandNoble.com. I'll be doing a public launch to tell the world in the weeks ahead - probably throw a party at my house with hardcover versions available. Here's an early look:

http://www.fastpencil.com/publications/6244-The-Salvage-Man

Favorite Albums of 2013

I long ago quit using terms like, “the best songs,” or “the best bands.” I know Rolling Stone likes to dedicate issues to such titles, but there’s really no such thing. There’s just our individual preferences, and every music lover has a different list of personal favorites.

Here is the list of my favorite three albums of 2013, the ones I listened to most in the car, through headphones on my 20 mile bike rides, or streamed on Spotify while I worked in the garden or cooked in the kitchen.

Each met my personal measure of an album of lasting pleasure. Music I immediately love tends to lose its luster quickly. But albums that at first listen seem to have only one gem, but on second listen reveal another, and then another and another as you listen more, albums where my favorite track shifts from one to another over repeated listening, that are deep with layers of mood and emotion ­– those are the albums that stick with me, that become my personal favorites.

And all three of these have another thing in common: melancholy. While each has fun, ballsy, hell-raising moments, each is also filled with dispondence, desolation and damaged souls seeking redemption.

I revel in that shit.

On Jason Isbell’s album, Southeastern, he sings the line: “They’re two kinds of men in this world and you’re neither of them.” That phrase hints at the beautifully compelling, in-between world this album occupies.

Isbell is best known as a member of the raucous, alt-county/Americana band Drive By Truckers (DBT), from Athens, Georgia. Fans of the DBT’s raw, beer-soaked chug and grind might not take to this album’s polished, careful sound and how closely it nibbles at the edges of pop-country. They might wonder where Isbell’s sloppy, ragged voice has gone and wince at the warmth and clarity of his newly sober tone. But at the same time, the songs on Southeastern will never be played on pop-country radio stations. Isbell refuses to wear the costumes or adhere to the artificial constraints of Nashville’s rigid modern rule book. On one song he drops the F-bomb while imagining the reaction of friends if he had sex with his cancer patient drinking partner, and on another he sings to an old girlfriend, “Get off my God-damn back” – essentially disqualifying himself from pop-country stardom.

But on Southeastern, the Alabama-born Isbell isn't saying, “Fuck Nashville,” like so many Americana artists don But then again, he’s ain't Nashville either.

Consider the plaintive, standout track, Traveling Alone, a take on the truck driving ballad. At first blush it sounds like the flawless melody, polish, and yearning sentiments tailor made for pop-country radio. He sings, “And I know every town worth passing through, but what good does knowing do, with no one to show it to.” But just at the point he might be getting pop-country listeners to sing along, he opines on being “strangled by” his “appetites,” of being so high that prostitutes won’t take his money. 

Regardless, Traveling Alone is a damn pretty song. 

Isbell is a recently recovering alcoholic. Themes revolving around that painful, destructive journey reoccur throughout the evocative lyrics, perhaps best in the aching opening track, Cover Me Up. It’s a folk/country autobiographical song about the redemption of climbing out of the bottle while falling in love. He laments with pleading urgency:

“In days when we raged, we flew off the page,

Such damage was done.

But I made it through, because somebody knew,

I was meant for someone.

So girl leave your boots by the bed, we ain’t leavin’ this room,

'less someone needs medical help, or the magnolias bloom”

Cover Me Up on Austin City Limits

Southeastern reveals Jason Isbell as a gifted songwriter, as impressive with wordplay as he is with melody. He can tell a good story, paint images of vivid emotion, and make you care about those damaged souls.

I’ve always liked the band The National. They’re originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, but now based in Brooklyn. Last spring these darlings of music magazine critics put out an astonishingly well-crafted album called Trouble Will Find Me.

Early summer I sampled it during a long bike ride among the hilly green cornfields north of Noblesville. The only song that initially stood out was the chilling, Fireproof, a harsh critique of a former lover. A gentle electric guitar picks like the rhythmic breaking of delicate glass, countered by the low gear, deep baritone of Mat Berninger singing, “You’re fireproof. Nothing breaks your heart. You’re fireproof. Wish I was that way.”

The album played through twice before I pulled back across Potters Bridge. On the second
 listen two more songs jumped out at me as if I hadn’t heard them at all yet; I Need My Girl, and Demons.

Demons Video

About two weeks later my favorite song had become the lyrically goofy, Humiliation. It’s a perfect example of why this band is so amazing. The opening bass line thumbs like a heartbeat at rest. In the second verse Berninger lists the events that led him to a dark, damaged place:

“All the L.A. women,

Fall asleep while swimmin’

I got paid to fish them out

And one day I lost the job

And I cried a little

I got fried a little

Then she laid her eyes on mine

And she said, “Babe, you’re better off”

By this time the bass thump is at a trot. As the song progresses the bass and drums ever so gently pick up speed through choruses and recurring bridges. Just as it winds down to an apparent fadeout it suddenly swells back to life, arcing in a new direction, the bass surging like a heartbeat in a full-out run, pulled along by an infectious, looping, elastic, guitar line.

Like U2 or The Police, there are no guitar or keyboard solos. The guitars and keyboards serve the song. If you’re familiar with rock music of the past 25 years, you know the brushes The National is painting with. But the quality of the art they’re creating is, while immediately familiar, astonishingly expressive, masterful, and delightfully surprising.

Valerie June was kicking around the backwaters of the Americana music movement until this year when she released Pushin’ Up Against A Stone. It’s a pretty damn stellar assortment of songs, so varied in style it could give you genre whiplash from one track to the next. From banjo finger-picking “old-tymie” mountain music, to blues, to full-out soul, nearly all songs were co-written by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, who also produced the album and plays guitar with June throughout.

My favorite tracks are the soul numbers, chief among them, The Hour, marked by a signature Auerbach blues groove intro that morphs into a rolling, soulful wave backed by Motownesque gospel vocals, and the dirty blues and chirping organ of Pushing Up Against A Stone. Other standouts include the country tune, Tennessee Time, which highlights June’s little girl whine, and the angry blues stomp, You Can’t Be Told.

You Can't Be Told video

If you’re a Black Keys fan, you’ll note Dan Auerbach’s fingerprints all over this album. But if he can be credited with stretching June into his trademark blues and soul, June likewise stretches him into writing and playing in the country and bluegrass genres she knows better. Though fabulous as-is, it will be interesting to see what Valerie June does next time out when she doesn’t have such a sonically recognizable producer and collaborator working with her.


My new book, The Salvage Man began going online for e-readers 3 weeks ago, currently available at iTunes, Amazon.com, Fastpencil and BarnesandNoble.com. I'll be doing a public launch to tell the world in the weeks ahead when it's finally available in all formats, but for now, here's an early look:
http://www.fastpencil.com/publications/6244-The-Salvage-Man

The War On Christmas Myth

No Virginia, there is no war on Christmas.

Yet, each December there are relentless cries of a war on Christmas. These cries of victimhood are a silly attempt to further inflame the culture wars and a blatant example of reverse political correctness.

Fox News talk show host, Bill O’Reilly has his “Christmas Under Siege” campaign. His web site has listed businesses whose advertising uses the phrase, “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” and urges his viewers to issue complaints. The American Family Association has boycotted Target in past years for not saying “Merry Christmas” in its ads and The Catholic League once boycotted Wal-Mart for the way the word Christmas is handled by the company’s web site.

In this week’s USA Today, conservative columnist Cal Thomas even wondered, “if non-religious songs like Frosty The Snowman and It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year might be threatened next?” Are you kidding me? I can’t get away from Christmas music no matter where I go this time of year. In fact most of the places being accused of participating in a war on Christmas play Christian Christmas carols over their loud speakers all day long and sell nativity scenes. But because they tell their employees to say, “Happy Holidays” they’re somehow Christian-haters?

On Fox News this week they’ve been regularly reporting stories of homeowners with bright, garish Christmas light displays getting complaints from neighbors. Individual disputes between neighbors add up to a national cultural attack on Christians?

If there’s doubt about a war on Christmas, at least we know the culture of victimhood is alive and well. There’s apparently plenty of people walking around with a chip on their shoulders looking to take offense.

Making up roughly 80% of the American population, Christians are in control of almost everything in this country from the leadership of nearly all of America’s major corporations to every political body that makes our laws. I’d be willing to bet that Christians overwhelmingly dominate the boards of directors of both Target and Wal-Mart.

Christmas is not in danger. The ACLU has mounted no campaign against it. Liberals are not meeting in dark cellars, twisting their mustaches, plotting its demise. Yet, some would have you think otherwise.

Our beliefs about the history of Christmas are at best selective amnesia. Few of us acknowledge that the Pagans celebrated the season with gift giving in Europe long before the birth of Christ. It was Constantine who added Christmas to the Roman calendar in the fourth century in an attempt to bring Pagans and Christians together. The Prophet Jeremiah condemned as Pagan (which it was – and so what?), the practice of cutting down trees, bringing them into the home and decorating them. Few know that the Puritans who founded our country detested the idea of Christmas. From their point of view, there was nothing about December 25^th in the Bible. For a period in the mid-1600s in colonial Massachusetts, celebrating Christmas was illegal. There were various Christian movements opposing the celebration of Christmas right up until the Civil War.

But while those facts provide perspective, none render Christmas illegitimate. Two thousand years of secular traditions bound around a much deeper religious meaning are a completely legitimate foundation for Christians to celebrate Christmas. It’s Christmas, so titled to celebrate and exalt the birth of Christ.

Yet, an obvious reason to say, “Happy Holidays,” is that the season starts with Thanksgiving and ends with New Years Day, two secular holidays. On December 22^nd Jews will begin celebrating Chanukah and before Thanksgiving Muslims began celebrating Ramadan. “Happy Holidays,” indeed. So if I say, “Happy Holidays,” I’m not saying, “Screw Christmas,” I’m saying, “Hope your Thanksgiving rocked, your Christmas is enlightening, and your New Year is healthy and prosperous . . . and oh yeah, if you’re Jewish or Muslim, I hope that all goes great for you, too!”

But there are apparently political correctness police who don’t want me to say, “Happy Holidays.” In general I prefer to say, “Merry Christmas.” That’s my thing. But if somebody else doesn’t, why would I want to force them?

Businesses who instruct their employees to say, “Happy Hoidays” are not trying to stamp out Christianity. They’re trying to be respectful of all their customers, not just the majority. During the holiday season Jewish customers are celebrating Chanukah, not Christmas, and some people aren’t celebrating anything beyond the joy of generosity felt from gift giving. Why, even though Christians are the overwhelming majority, would businesses want to alienate non-Christians?

There are pundits, politicians, and demagogues whose fame and fortune rely on our outrage. They’ve got books to sell, ad revenues to gather for their evening news channel talk shows, and votes to gather at election time. If you’re comfortable and calm, it’s of little use to them. So they use the oldest trick in the political book – cry persecution when it doesn’t really exist to rally their forces – point at an enemy, accuse them of wrong, and urge your brethren to take up arms, “before it’s too late!”

There is no war on Christmas. The entire notion is a carefully manufactured myth. Christians control nearly everything in this country by massive, indisputable majorities.

But at a time when there are Christians and others of all faiths in this world who are truly persecuted for their beliefs, it is at best embarrassing to claim victimhood because someone says, “Happy Holidays,” instead of “Merry Christmas.”

My new book, The Salvage Man began going online for e-readers 3 weeks ago, currently available at iTunes, Amazon.com, Fastpencil and BarnesandNoble.com. I'll be doing a public launch to tell the world in the weeks ahead when it's finally available in all formats, but for now, here's an early look:
http://www.fastpencil.com/publications/6244-The-Salvage-Man

Indiana At The Gay Marriage Tipping Point

Back in April I wrote about the historic national sea change in favor of gay marriage and gay rights in general. But I hadn’t anticipated that by year’s end Hoosiers would be in a dramatic standoff on gay marriage and activists would be working quietly right here in Noblesville.

The buzz is about HJR-6, a proposed amendment to the Indiana Constitution that would ban gay marriage and civil unions. If state legislators pass the law, it goes to the voters next year as a referendum.

Over Thanksgiving I found myself listing Indiana’s amazing turn of events for a Hoosier-born gay family member who married her partner during the original glimmer of time it was legal in California.

 

Luke Kenley

An initial pebble in the water came a year ago when Noblesville’s own influential State Senator, Republican Luke Kenley announced he opposed the amendment. He told a CNHI Statehouse Bureau reporter last December, “I really value the institution of heterosexual marriage, but I do not think that putting a statement in the (state) Constitution which runs down or is bigoted toward people who have a different kind of loving relationship, that I may not understand, is going to be productive.”

Luke has a way of crystallizing the obvious at precisely the moment when others aren’t seeing it, but should be.

Then an eye-popping wave of opposition to the amendment appeared this past summer when two of Indiana’s leading corporations, Eli Lilly and Cummins asked legislators to defeat the law. Both companies released strong statements through Freedom Indiana, an organization working to stop the law’s passage. They were joined by the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce.

The unified message: HJR-6 is bad for business.

What started to creep into state-wide thinking about the law: Just it’s consideration – even to have it on the ballot for voters to consider would be damaging for Indiana’s reputation in the eyes of the nation, giving the impression that Indiana isn’t simply a conservative place of traditional values, but a backward place, unwelcoming to people of diverse backgrounds, and out of touch with emerging national consensus on the civil rights issue of our time.

That’s when the universities started to speak out.

If the first wave was corporate, the second was higher education. It rolled across the state in September and October. The presidents of Purdue, Indiana University, Ball State and then Butler all spoke out saying, “Kill this bill.” Where corporate leaders were worried that HJR-6 would affect their ability to attract quality employees, the university presidents were worried about attracting the best and the brightest students to their campuses. Not just gay students, but straight students who might perceive Indiana as a place that enshrined bigotry in its constitution.

If you’d asked any Hoosier political talking head two years ago if they could foresee this growing wave of opposition, they’d have rolled their eyes and said, “P-lease!”

But there was still another wave building. By late November and early December mayors of major cities across the state began weighing in. Eleven mayors, including those from Indianapolis, Bloomington, Evansville, Anderson, Lafayette, Hammond, Ft. Wayne, South Bend and even Carmel released a joint statement opposing the amendment.

Republican Mayor Jim Brainard of Carmel said, “Our government needs to be focused on attracting and retaining good jobs and improving public education for future generations.” He added that government isn’t the institution that should be deciding who is allowed to marry.

This wave was bi-partisan: 6 Democrats and 5 Republicans.

My sources tell me that Noblesville Mayor, John Ditslear also opposes the amendment, but has refused to do so publically.

If this wave continues, Ditslear may wish he’d had the vision and courage of leaders like Kenley or Brainard. Polling over time reveals a decrease in Hoosiers’ support for gay marriage bans every year in the past decade. Polls in 2012 showed Hoosiers evening split on the issue. Polls this year show supporters of a gay marriage ban are now in the minority. And Freedom Indiana has community activists on the ground right here on Noblesville’s courthouse square, chatting up people in coffee shops and restaurants, looking to build small-business opposition to the law to try to influence State Representative, Republican Kathy Richardson to vote no on HJR-6.

In my blog post back in April, I compared those who oppose gay marriage today with those who “stood in the schoolhouse doors” back in the 1950s, trying to keep African Americans out of whites-only schools. I look back on news stories from that time and wince at the faces of those angrily trying to keep blacks “in their place.” To fight so hard on the wrong side at the moment of the tipping point, believing so strongly in a cruel opinion that you can’t see how harshly history will soon judge you, well . . . I almost feel sorry for those folks.

 

Kathy Richardson

I feel the same way for Tea Party Hoosiers and the Christian-right today. Future generations will judge their actions on this issue and won't judge them kindly. But I’m not angry with them. My heart just hurts for them a little. But not as bad as it hurts for gays and lesbians who have to look on while we all debate whether they should be given the same rights the rest of us take for granted.

I’m hoping Kathy Richardson feels this sea change and has her eye on history.

But while these waves of change are strong, they’re not tsunamis. As I ticked off this list of recent history for my married gay family member, she listened silently and said little. She must have been painfully aware that I wasn’t expressing excitement about making gay marriage legal in Indiana, as it is in her state. I was simply excited that we might not chisel its ban into our constitution.

We’ve come a long way, but still have a long way to go.

To share your thoughts with Kathy Richardson on HJR-6, her number is 317-773-6123 and her email is: h29@iga.in.gov

My new book, The Salvage Man began going online for e-readers last week, currently available at Amazon.com, Fastpencil and BarnesandNoble.com. I'll be doing a big launch to tell the world in the weeks ahead when it's finally available in all formats, but for now, here's an early look:
http://www.fastpencil.com/publications/6244-The-Salvage-Man