This Holy Week, I reflect on Mary Magdalene. The Gospels tell us she was possessed by seven demons. The popular TV series “The Chosen” powerfully opens by portraying how this tormented her wildly, violently, catastrophically. Mary Magdalene experienced the lowest possible lows in life. But her encounter with Jesus changed everything.

Later, she was the first human being on earth to see our Risen Lord. Not Peter. Not John. Not the disciples who walked with Him for three years. The woman with the demonic history. The woman with the wounds. The woman who experienced the lowest of lows — Jesus gifted her the highest of all possible human moments.

I experienced an echo of this pattern. In 2019, I was hospitalized seven times from suicidal depression, onset by fibromyalgia from internal pressures as I sought external validation. I carry scars on my arms from the hospital IV needles. That was the lowest place of my life — physically tormented, my body and mind surrendered in ways I fought for years to prevent.

But Jesus met me, and encountering Him changed everything. Flash forward, this year during Lenten season, I stood on the mainstage of the Trump Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. In a red dress. As a soloist, leading the audience to sing the Star-Spangled Banner. As America turns 250 years old.

These same arms, carrying IV needle scars — open wide with joy on America’s national stage. Lowest of lows. Highest of highs. Same woman. Jesus rewrote my script. I wrote Motorhome Prophecies to share how He can do the same for us all.

Review by Robert Ordway

Carrie Sheffield’s Motorhome Prophecies is the kind of book you don’t just read, you wrestle with it. It’s raw without being reckless, honest without being self-indulgent, and deeply personal in a way that forces you to confront your own assumptions about suffering, resilience, and what it actually means to be redeemed.

A fellow “Elder Millennial” (we grew up without smartphones), Sheffield takes us inside a childhood marked by instability, abuse, and spiritual confusion, but what makes this memoir remarkable isn’t just the darkness—it’s her refusal to either sanitize it or be defined by it. This is not trauma packaged for consumption. It’s testimony.

It’s not easy being the fifth of eight children, but even harder when your dad is a mentally ill, violent, street musician who thought he was a Mormon prophet. He made Carrie perform music with her proselytizing family on the streets as she went in and out of 17 public schools and homeschool, all while living out of a motorhome, sheds, and tents. Her stint at an inner-city urban school, where 90% of the students were black, adds a unique twist of culture to her lived experience as a “trailer park girl from Utah.” She reports multiple siblings have attempted suicide, and two brothers developed schizophrenia, suffering she believes is tied to their child abuse.

What struck me most is how American this story is, not in the easy, bumper-sticker sense, but in the deeper, harder truth: that where you start does not have to determine where you end. Sheffield’s journey is chaotic and nonlinear, but it bends toward hope.

And yet, hope here isn’t abstract. It’s anchored.

For me, that’s where this book hit home.

There’s a particular kind of grief that rearranges your life in ways you never quite recover from. Losing my father to ALS was one of those moments. Losing my mother to suicide was another. Those experiences don’t just leave scars—they leave questions about suffering and meaning and whether any of this can be redeemed.

What Sheffield understands, and what she articulates with clarity and restraint, is that faith is not an escape from those questions. It’s what allows you to survive, derive meaning and purpose from them, and even redeem them.

Throughout the book, Sheffield provides commentary on the Mormon faith, particularly of the fundamentalist variety, which drove many of her insecurities about what it means to be a woman and a Christian. I’ve mentioned the book When Your Best Isn’t Good Enough in previous writing, and I can relate when Sheffield mentions how “black or white perfectionism haunted her for decades” and how it led her to verbally abuse others and herself. (p.43)

We also both faced some level of estrangement from a parent, and when we did not follow their expected path, we were sent nastygrams (p174) about falling short, further blurring the need for acceptance while also understanding how distance can provide clarity in our pursuit of the truth. Vice President JD Vance cites a similar theme in Hillbilly Elegy (p.138) as recognizing the need to remove himself from the situation with his mother by choosing to live with his mamaw for three years.

When finally leaving the LDS faith, Sheffield hits the bottom with severe suicidal ideation, but she powered through by becoming a “career woman,” earning a master’s degree from Harvard, competing in a Miss USA-system state beauty pageant, and working at the elite financial firms of both Goldman Sachs and Moody’s.

Like many people today, as she fell away from faith, politics became her religion, but that all fades. As she studied science, history, anthropology, and other disciplines, her faith in God and Christianity grew. (p.255)

The book closes with a chapter about forgiving her dad and then wrestling with God. Today, she embraces the power of prayer, music, and gratitude as her weapons against depression, doubt, and fear.

Sheffield’s story ultimately becomes one of spiritual reorientation: away from a distorted understanding of God and toward a relationship with Christ that is both grounded and transformative. She strikes a balance of grace and truth. There’s no triumphalism here, just a movement toward healing and grace.

That resonates deeply with me. Because if I’m honest, it wasn’t professional success, intellectual clarity, or even community that pulled me out of my lowest moments. It was faith. Not perfectly lived, not always steady, but real. The kind that meets you in the dark and, over time, teaches you how to walk forward again.

That’s what Motorhome Prophecies offers.

Carrie’s memoir is not just about overcoming hardship. It’s a case for redemption, not as a cliché, but as a lived reality. Sheffield’s journey shows that suffering never disappears but can be transformed.

In a cultural moment that often oscillates between cynicism and self-absorption, this book cuts a different path. It insists that healing is possible and Truth matters. That faith, real, grounded, Christ-centered faith, can rebuild what feels irreparably broken.

For those seeking to be pulled out of isolation and liberated from the demons of their past, her message is one worth taking seriously.

In The Transhumanist Temptation, my friend Grayson Quay views the issue through the lens of faith and scripture as he walks us through the dangers posed by our use of technology to reinvent human nature. His writing cites a range of thinkers throughout history, including philosophers such as Hume and Nietzsche, theologians GK Chesterton and CS Lewis, and futurists such as Ray Kurzweil. Grayson’s book is certainly a thought-provoking read, worthy of attention and an opportunity for us all to reflect on what really matters in life.

I knew I wanted to write a book, but what should I write it about?

During my eight years of writing — both as a freelancer and a full-time journalist — I’d cranked out hundreds of news blurbs, op-eds, columns, and essays, but never a book. I felt like it was time for me to take the next step.

When I reviewed my previous output, however, it seemed frustratingly eclectic. I’d never developed a clear “beat.” Click around my various author pages, and you could find me fulminating against abortion, warning against the dangers of smartphones, exploring how basic questions of political philosophy manifest themselves in the horse race of American elections, critiquing libertarian economics, or wandering off into esoteric musings about reenchantment and spiritual warfare.

These all seemed completely unrelated. But were they? One day, I stumbled across a post from an acquaintance and internet historian named Katherine Dee (more commonly known by her handle, @defaultfriend), in which she predicted that the culture war of the coming decades would be fought not over wokeness, but over transhumanism.

That one tweet acted on my mind like a catalyst, causing previously inert elements to react in new and surprising ways.

All at once, I realized I did have a beat: transhumanism — the use of technology to reshape humanity in ways extrinsic to human nature according to human will. I’d been writing about transhumanism all along.

I saw that, although people tend to laugh off transhumanism as sci-fi speculation or Silicon Valley kookery, it is already all around us and stretches all the way back to Eden, when Satan told Eve, “Ye shall be as gods.”

I decided that the goal of my book would be twofold:

To recreate for my readers the realization I had when I encountered Katherine’s tweet and to call them back to the only thing capable of standing against transhumanism: a natural law framework, preferably informed and sustained by Christianity.

I threw together an outline, splitting my book into five sections, each exploring how the “transhumanist temptation” has warped our relationship with some important aspect of human existence.

Section 1 is titled “Bodies” and deals broadly with bioethics. Section 2, “Reality,” covers virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and how these new technologies discarnate us. Sections 3 and 4 — “Politics” and “Work” — discuss how our political and economic systems leave us vulnerable to transhumanism. Section 5 is called “God” and focuses on the religious nature of transhumanism, the rise of transhumanist spiritualities, and how transhumanism subverts Christianity.

I won’t summarize all five here (I need to leave you with some incentive to buy the book), but a quick overview of Section 1 should provide some sense of how all-encompassing transhumanism really is.

In a 2023 interview, Mary Harrington called the birth control pill “the first transhumanist technology … because it doesn’t set out to fix something that’s wrong with me, like a broken arm … It sets out to break something that’s working properly in accordance with desire.”

Armed with this insight, I applied it to other questions: abortion, surrogacy, transgenderism, and even assisted suicide.

In each case, the practice turned out to be based on what I can only describe as a contempt for human embodiment — transhumanist author Zoltan Istvan writes that “biology is for beasts” — and a demand that medical science cater to this contempt.

If you’re fertile and you don’t want to be, a doctor will prescribe you a pill to disrupt your healthy cycle. If you’re pregnant and don’t want to be, a doctor will kill your healthy baby. If you want a baby but are scared of stretch marks and labor, a doctor will help you outsource the job to a desperate surrogate or (maybe someday) an artificial womb. If you’re male and you want to be female, a doctor will carve you up. If you’re alive and want to be dead, a doctor will kill you.

Historically, the purpose of medicine has been to restore human bodies to the type of flourishing proper to human nature. But thanks to the influence of thinkers like Darwin, Hume, Nietzsche, and Sartre, educated people no longer believe in something called “human nature.” If we are the mere products of blind evolution, then what humanity is cannot tell us anything about what we ought to be or how we ought to live.

A pregnant woman with a teleological view of human nature might infer from it a duty to protect her unborn child. That same woman, corrupted by transhumanism, would think only of her own bodily autonomy and her absolute right to withhold the shelter of her womb from a baby she deemed an unwanted intruder.

With nature out of the picture, only will remains. There is no mode of flourishing (“eudaimonia” in Greek) that is proper to man as man. We have no end (“telos”) but what we choose for ourselves.

This rejection of human nature promises liberation but leads to dystopia. As long as human nature remains a constant, there are limits on how inhuman society can become. But once governments and corporations gain access to technologies that can reshape our bodies and minds according to their priorities, we will be putty in their hands.

Ted Kaczynski put it best: “In the future social systems will not be adjusted to suit the needs of human beings. Instead, human beings would be adjusted to suit the needs of the system.”

It’s already happening. Women freeze their eggs to keep their careers on track. Rowdy middle school boys get Ritalin prescriptions. Embryo screening is here already, and genetic engineering is just over the horizon.

Nobody (at least for now) will force you to accept these technological tweaks to your humanity or impose them on your offspring, but the state, market, and culture will certainly “nudge” you to do so — and punish you if you refuse.

Those who comply (or whose parents comply before they’re even born) will suffer an even darker fate: they will know that they have ceased to be people and have become products.

This is the choice ahead of us: either we recover the idea of human nature and deploy technology only in ways that promote the flourishing proper to it, or we succumb to the transhumanist temptation and usher in the abolition of man.

In The Elder Millennial Memoir, Parts 1 and 2, I covered how J.D. Vance was the inspiration for finishing my book back in 2016, as well as the digital tools it took to complete a first draft. As an addendum, I included a list of Millennial Memoirs that have kept me inspired.

This post builds on that and explores the unusual high number of parallels between J.D. Vance and me from years past. Both our political and religious worldviews were highly shaped by the family and friends around us, along with national affairs of the day.

The Iraq War

J.D. Vance is six months older than I, and we both graduated high school in 2003, just months after the Iraq War started. Seeing 9/11 live is a defining moment for our generation, and I attribute our family’s culture for compelling us to join the military (p. 156) as Ordways have fought in every war since the Revolution. Then, and to this day, DC politicians have said the only way to move up is through college (p. 244). We both came from subpar schools, but we can attest that the teachers did everything they could to help us succeed, given the limited resources and circumstances beyond their control (p. 244). We were burdened with the idea of school debt and financial aid forms, as well as moving to a new world (p. 156). Still, Vance admitted he joined the Marines because he wasn’t ready for adulthood (p. 177). His family said he wasn’t a good fit for the military (p. 157), while my Dad said I was “too smart” to join.

Shortly after 9/11, I took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) as my high school was one of the few places where it was forced upon all juniors. It was the only test I ever enjoyed as Dad’s blue-collar parenting prepared me for the electrical, mechanical, and woodshop sections that were foreign to most of my peers. I should have done better on this exam, but it was also during a time when my Dad’s ALS was getting bad, and mom’s bipolar disorder drove family fights that lasted all night, every night.

Not long thereafter, all four branches would be calling my landline phone, offering sizable signing bonuses. Some would show up at my house unannounced. I visited the Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) in Chicago and enrolled in the Delayed Entry Program (DEP) for the U.S. Navy. Vance’s notes, “...mom wanted us to be exposed to people of all walks of life.” (p. 64). My mom beat a similar drum as a Navy Reservist, and said, “The government paid me to see the world, and I got to work with all kinds of people.” Between us, only Vance would be the one to get such an experience. (p. 160)

Both Vance and I had serious reservations about joining, and they centered on family. He knew his mamaw was on borrowed time, and she might pass during his service (p. 158) as he was taught “[mamaw] loathed anything that smacked of a lack of complete devotion to family” (p. 41). Likewise, my Dad was in year five of ALS and the idea of leaving his side was unbearable. My loyalty to him superseded my loyalty to the country.

Shortly after Mom left for the Iraq War in March 2003, my life changed overnight when I was awarded the Lilly Community Endowment Scholarship, which covered full tuition for four years at any Indiana university or college. The program was started because of the “brain drain” in Indiana, something also described by Vance about people becoming educated and leaving their home communities for good. (p. 180).

Vance would receive a scholarship years later that also changed the trajectory of his life, sending him to Yale Law School. (p. 199). We were both awarded purely based on socioeconomic status and the challenges of our lived experience.

Vance and another millennial author, Rob Henderson (Troubled, 2024), attribute the military for providing the structure and order they needed to be productive members of society. (p. 174) Vance says, “It was the Marine Corps that gave me the opportunity to truly fail…” (p. 175).

Dads

Vance had a revolving door of father figures (p. 88), but says he was surrounded by caring men who made a difference (p. 239). I had the same male support figures when I was a vagabond between Virginia and Kentucky, age 0-4, and after grad school when I became engaged in local politics.

Unlike Vance, I didn’t need the same structure or discipline from the military because Dad raised me in old Kentucky ways, a blend of a Culture of Honor and The Agrarian Tradition. Great grandpa, Papaw, and all his siblings served in some capacity, so unprecedented levels of “order” were a family affair as I often referred to my Dad as “Sir.”

Even though he didn’t serve in the military, Dad acted like it. There was order, routine, process, and no back talk. Like basic training, Dad didn’t need force because he knew how to get into my mind. The fear of getting hit was more than sufficient, but every once in a while, a ‘thump on the head’ was a primary ‘attention getter’ as he called it, something passed down from Papaw.

Vance says we have “.. a peculiar crisis of masculinity” (p. 5) as a societal issue, with “too many young men immune to hard work.” (p. 5). I couldn’t agree more as I witnessed a similar passivity by peers from challenged backgrounds. I’m thankful for the high expectation of a strong work ethic, a framework Dad instilled from generations handed down.

Vance received a BB gun from his papaw. (p. 106) which paid dividends to Vance as a serviceman. (p. 105). Likewise, Dad bought me a Red Ryder, and it became a useful tool to teach me personal responsibility and a deep respect for weapons. I bonded with my Dad from reruns of Terminator 2 on a cheater box acquired through steel mill buddies while Vance watched the same with his mamaw (p. 166).

Falling Apart

For Vance, things began to unravel when he was nine (p. 70), and for me at 13. He moved around a lot as his mom changed boyfriends while I was trying to internalize my Dad’s new disease, which led to us both acting out at school (p. 95). Our grades started to slip, but we couldn’t tell anyone what was going on (p. 72). Our mothers forced us to meet with a therapist, and we saw them purely as obstacles (p. 120). Given that my mom worked in the school system, she had the counselors ask me specific questions and then shared my responses with the world, causing me to shut down on everyone. Vance’s mamaw said, “You never talk about family to some stranger. Never.” (p. 41). I followed the same ethos by bottling up everything inside which leads to all kinds of negative externalizes that arise in various ways years down the road.

Vance notes southern culture with “Family, friends and neighbors would barge into your home without much warning.” (p. 32). Foreign to a northerner like Mom, my next-door neighbor and great grandma, a 1970s Kentucky migrant, would do the same. Mom would berate her for being nosy and not “respecting our family’s privacy” (ironic given her gossip). Vance mentions his health issues from the trauma (p. 72), whereas mine were weekly migraines that lasted for years until my Dad’s passing.

Moms

Our moms were good people, but a major source of our early challenges. They had erratic behavior, so I can relate to “Never speak at a reasonable volume when screaming will do.” (p. 71). They both thought money was deemed affection (p. 136). My mom worked side jobs to buy my TI-89 for advanced math, whereas Vance’s mamaw sacrificed dinner to buy his. (p. 139) They both bent over backwards to make sure we had “a nice Christmas” regardless of financial situation (p. 251).

His mom would make up for her emotional volatility by buying him football cards (p. 76), whereas I got whatever was on my list that Dad said no to previously. Our moms took us to church on the rare occasions when they thought we needed religion. (p. 86).

Our moms also used selective stories to weaponize men against us. Reconnecting with his biological father, Vance learned the truth about why his parents split (p. 94). My mom often dug up my Dad’s past youthful shortcomings, and she had nothing positive to say when I discovered who my biological father was at age 22. From then on, explaining my family story including half-sisters with different last names has been complicated, something Vance has dealt with his entire life. (p. 80).

Responses to death are highly charged events for our moms. Vance’s mother became cold and possessive to the family when his papaw died (p. 112), and when my uncle committed suicide, my mom also claimed their relationship was “extra special,” so no one should be grieving like them. When Vance’s mamaw died, what little she had was split between him and his sister (p. 170), the same for my sister and me when our Dad died in 2003.

At some point, Vance and I couldn’t take it anymore and exploded. Vance belittled his mom when she asked for his pee so she could pass a drug test for work (p. 120). My mom said some of the nastiest things to my Dad while he was dying (saving exact verbiage for the memoir). One night, I popped out of bed, held her throat against the fridge with my arm cocked, but never threw the punch. My Dad subsequently yelled at me the next day as he said, “Never hit a woman.” Even though I didn’t, he thought my level of aggression toward her was unacceptable.

Both of our mothers had an appreciation for education (p. 64), took us to the public library to get books (p. 60). I read every Goosebumps book published to get free pizza from BookIt! Program. They completed our science fair projects to perfection without our consent (p. 65), but in many ways we can attribute part of our success to the seeds our mothers planted early on. They knew education was the way up and out.

Vance acknowledged that he never tried to sympathize or understand his mom (p. 231), and neither did I, but we both came around after we had our own personal circumstances figured out. To better my environment, like Vance, I also refused to live with my Mom after my first year of college, after Dad passed away, and instead, moved into the basement of my then-girlfriend’s parents’ house.

Vance’s mom had a failed suicide attempt (p. 74), but I’m happy to see she eventually overcame her drug addiction. My mom, on the other hand, could not overcome her challenges with bipolar disorder and took her life in 2009. In the end, I think Vance and I both tried to blend the right amount of compassion and accountability to the best of our ability when dealing with our mothers.

The Savior

In high school, Vance’s GPA dropped to 2.1 at the end of his freshman year (p. 127) while I landed a D on my permanent record in Chemistry halfway through my sophomore year. I began drinking in the garage during Dad’s six-month stay (Christmas 2000) with my widowed mamaw, who’d relocated an hour south of our house in 1997. After witnessing his decline during visits, I planned out my own suicide.

Vance and I needed a savior.

We attribute our “three years of stability” (p. 138) to one person. For Vance, it was moving in with his mamaw, who gave him three rules: Get good grades, get a job, and “get off your ass and help me.” (p. 133). It was a loose but non-negotiable framework also delivered to me by my Dad. Neither of us had a set chore list (p. 133), but I can say, even after he got sick, Dad always had ‘projects’ that interrupted my time with friends. Vance got a job at Dillman’s grocery store (p. 138) while I worked at a Polish Catholic reception hall. That work ethic and financial need forced both of us to hold two jobs (and at one time three) in college (p. 182).

In his work, Vance noticed that people gamed the welfare system (p. 139), but I recognized that much earlier in first grade when a friend raised by a single mother had a “free lunch” ticket (marked by color), yet got the new Shaq Attaq shoes while my family shopped at PayLess for the school season (imitation LA Lights were $19). This also happened with each new video game system that came out through the 90s, the poorest kids always seemed to have the newest stuff.

My stability came just weeks before my Dad moved back into the house in March 2001. I started dating a girl who stopped me from killing myself, was always encouraging, and provided a non-judgmental sounding board when it came to my family problems. Her visits to my house after school also helped to stifle fights between my parents, which were often initiated by Mom. With my girlfriend there, mom couldn’t be seen participating, a method to control her side of the narrative to the outside world.

I never got below a 4.0 from that point on and went from the bottom of my class to the Top 10. She got me out of “metal head” black clothes of depression and turned me into a walking ad for Old Navy. She is the reason I am alive today.

Kentucky

Vance identifies with the Appalachian migrants (p. 3), calls himself a hill person (p. 22), and says he will always think of Jackson as home (p. 18). Culturally, I, too, think of myself as a Western Kentuckian. Both Vance and I spent summers visiting our grandparents in Kentucky until we were 12 (p. 12), called them mamaw and papaw (p. 23), spent a lot of time on porch swings (p. 12), and stopped for the passing hearse when neighbors died (p. 12) out of respect. His family used phrases like “too big for your britches” (p. 30), as did my mamaw when I was “acting smart.” During a recent visit to Kentucky, one of my grandparents' old neighbors quoted my Papaw’s sentiments about me, “That boy might be too smart for his own good!”

Our grandparents migrated up hillbilly highways (p. 28) a decade apart and from opposite ends of the state. Armco in Middletown, Ohio, was an economic savior for his grandparents (p. 55) just as U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana, was for mine. They both returned to Kentucky often out of a sense of duty (p. 124), went south for the holidays (p. 29), believed in an “...intense loyalty, a fierce dedication to family and country,” (p. 3), and “... had an almost religious faith in hard work and the American Dream.” (p. 35) My grandparents’ visits home are well tracked in The Crittenden Press, whose archives go back to 1879. They are now accessible online.

Vance’s papaw was a Democrat because it was the “party that protected working people” (p35), but mine was a Republican because Crittenden County was a cultural anomaly in western Kentucky during and after the Civil War. Research says that is because of its close ties to Cave-In-Rock, Illinois, and President Lincoln. Despite many residents owning slaves, Crittenden emerged as the most pro-Union county in the western Pennyrile region.

Other than Mamaw saying, “well shitfire,” my grandparents cussed a lot less but would have agreed with Vance’s mamaw, “Never be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them.” (p. 36). This outright rejection of victimhood culture while illustrating the importance of family and community is part of our shared identity and leads into my next post, which will feature a cultural analysis of his book. In addition, I’ve provided all the books (but not online research) used to better understand southern migration in the 20th century along with his work.

1. Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles

2. Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class

3. The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America

4. Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790–2020

5. Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration

6. The Ethnic Southerners

7. White Southerners

8. Natives and Newcomers: Ethnic Southerners and Southern Ethnics

9. The Invisible Minority: Urban Appalachians

10. From Mountain to Metropolis: Appalachian Migrants in American Cities

11. Appalachian migrants in urban America: Cultural conflict or ethnic group formation?

12. One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture

13. Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia

14. Down Home, Downtown: Urban Appalachians Today

15. Mountain People in a Flat Land: A Popular History of Appalachian Migration to Northeast Ohio, 1940–1965

16. Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South

17. Plain Folk of the Old South

18. Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon

19. Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies

20. Uptown; Poor Whites In Chicago

21. From Diversity to Unity: Southern and Appalachian Migrants in Uptown Chicago, 1950-1970

22. Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Interracial Solidarity in 1960s-70s New Left Organizing

23. Hillbilly Revolutionary

24. Hillbilly Odyssey

25. Culture Of Honor: The Psychology Of Violence In The South

26. Don’t Get above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class

27. Dixie’s Forgotten People, New Edition: The South’s Poor Whites (Minorities in Modern America)

28. White ethnics: Their life in working class America

29. TVA and the Dispossessed: The Resettlement of Population In The Norris Dam Area

30. The Confessions of Edward Isham: A Poor White Life of the Old South

Alcohol is the socially acceptable coping mechanism of middle America. We love to sing Jimmy Buffet’s “5 O’Clock Somewhere,” and blast country music songs about whiskey and women and broken hearts. But behind the humor lives a quiet crisis – one that rarely hits headlines but is spiritually devastating all the same.

I know this because I lived it.

Not in a bar or amid crazy chaos, but in a stable, churchgoing, middle-class life that looked fine from the outside. I wasn’t falling apart dramatically, but I was internally adrift – spiritually dulled, emotionally numbed, and exhausted from using alcohol to “manage” life. I was “getting by,” but when you never reach the destination, it becomes lifelong self-medication.

Most people don’t know how many everyday American Christians struggle with substances in some form or fashion. It doesn’t always look like the stereotype of addiction and for that reason, it’s hidden within the routines of everyday life.

Millennials like myself were raised to “get over it” (trauma, hardship, unfairness, struggle) and never got the chance to process our experiences. The weight of that buried, unprocessed pain led some of us toward a numbing agent – one that was really a trap.

The Heartland Is Hurting, Quietly

When we talk about addiction in America, we often focus on the opioid crisis or extreme devastation. But alcoholism is more of a slow burn, eroding:

• marriages

• mental clarity

• spiritual sensitivity

• parenting patience

• purpose and direction

It’s a gradual collapse, like a building that breaks down one brick at a time. You don’t always see it happening, which is why we need this conversation more than ever. One of the best resources for people living amid addiction is a faith community, and yet in many churches, alcohol (and other drugs) are either tiptoed around or ignored entirely.

Because of that, people lack the opportunity to share their struggle. It feels too prickly, too vulnerable and unflattering to bring up out of the blue. But, what if they were presented and opportunity to get help or share in confidence? We’re missing that explicit and intentional space in the church today.

The truth is, sobriety is spiritual – it must be.

Sobriety Is a Spiritual Rebuild

Sobriety didn’t save me – Jesus did. But, He used my struggle and sobriety to build my faith and clarify our relationship to the point I could see again.

Alcohol addiction isn’t just chemical. It’s spiritual and we must approach this problem, both individually and societally, in such a way. In my new book, Freely Sober, I remind readers it’s no surprise alcohol is often referred to as “spirits.” Inebriation changes you and incpacitates you to be the person God created you to be, at least temporarily.

There is a reason we feel so out of alignment after a night of drinking. There is a reason we get this silent pull to stop putting it int our bodies. And yet, we return to it again and again hoping the next time will be different.

What most people mean when they tell me they “can’t stop drinking” is this:

They can’t carry their pain alone. The alcohol has become like a friend – soothing, numbing, calming, helpful. But, like an abusive partner, there’s a lot of lying, gaslighting and broken promises about the long-term results.

And that’s why fellow Christians and the Church must lead. Not with shame or suspicion, but with discipleship, community, confession, and a reminder that God alone is our refuge and strength – the one who can never break a promise.

If the church wants to revive its communities – rural, working-class, middle America, specifically – it must speak honestly about alcohol’s effects on individuals and families. It must support people in the gray zone between “fine” and “falling apart.” Christians don’t need more platitudes. They need a place to tell the truth. This is a discipleship moment – and a chance for the church to lead in freedom.

An Invitation For You

If any part of this feels familiar—if you’ve wondered whether alcohol is taking more than it’s giving—I wrote Freely Sober: Rethinking Alcohol Through the Lens of Faith for you.

It’s a faith-centered path toward clarity, peace, and healing, grounded not in willpower, but in God’s transforming grace.

You don’t have to walk this road alone. And you don’t have to wait for your life to fall apart before you choose a new one.

Pre-order Freely Sober today, and let this be the moment your story begins to change.

Ericka Andersen is a writer & mom of two in Indianapolis, Indiana. She’s the author Freely Sober, Reason to Return & Leaving Cloud 9. She writes regularly for Christianity Today, WORLD, the Wall Street Journal & more.

Of all the things I had to move, the books were the worst. Although I have tried e-books since about 2012, I still prefer physical copies. For anyone relocating, I highly recommend these blue tarp zipper bags from Amazon, as they made transportation much easier. Loaded, I put one on the scale, and it was just shy of 100 pounds.

This spring, I purchased a townhouse just a block off Lake Michigan in Gary, Indiana. My real estate agent was a cybersecurity fellow in President Biden’s White House through 2024 – always interesting how my relationships and network come full circle. My place looks across the street into the Indiana Dunes National Park, which received its designation in 2019 after 100 years of advocacy. As a student of “Sand & Steel,” a juxtaposition in its own right, expect to see more writing about the founding of Gary, U.S. Steel, and the modern birthplace of ecology, founded in the dunes.

When it comes to finishing my memoir, Millrat, progress has been painfully slow this year with the job, but the longer I wait, the better it gets. With each book read, I always find some valuable takeaway about my faith, family, or community that needs to be noted.

This year, I’ve been able to read over 60 books. I’ve tried to select the 10 that are most applicable to the general public, even though most of my selections serve as background to the memoir. Given my family’s 200+ year history in western Kentucky, I went down a rabbit hole researching black and white southern migration in the 20th century. That work became the inspiration for my TEDxGary talk, delivered on October 18 at Indiana University Northwest (IUN). The talk was titled, The Power of Storytelling: Lessons From The Agrarian Tradition.

My goal going into 2026 is to get published nationally in a few journals and magazines as a way to assert myself as an authority on a few topics. The purpose is to make my book proposal more attractive to traditional publishers. With that being said, here’s what I’ve got for you in 2025. As always, the complete list of what I read is available here on Goodreads.

Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace, Kimberly B. Smith (2014)

Although not new, this was the most transformative book I read this year. Wendell Berry is renowned for his writings on farming and conservation, and is highly regarded by environmentalists. This book examines his philosophy and contributions to environmental theory and politics. As of this writing, he is 91 and still living in Henry County, KY. I visited The Berry Center recently and hope to get one of his books signed in the coming months. Despite being raised in the north, my perspective on such issues was shaped by the Ordway lineage in western Kentucky and aligned with Berry’s work in The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture.

The New Conservatives: Restoring America’s Commitment to Family, Community, and Industry, edited by Oren Cass (2025).

This book is a collection of essays that were previously published in various outlets, primarily in the D.C. area. The authors critique policy from the market, labor, globalization, China, industrial policy, family, worker power, and education. The approach is one that questions the history of economists and policy makers, where the only real end game is more consumption and increased GDP. As a member of American Compass myself, I appreciate some of the contrarian views. Highly recommend Oren Cass’s book, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America (2018).

Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (2025)

Can’t say I cared for Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized (2021) because he is definitely one-sided in his partisan commentary, but I was recommended this read by a few folks, so here we are. Given my background in housing policy, I appreciate his thoughts on how we can increase supply to get prices down, as this will be a defining issue for younger generations. Now it was a bit humorous that (as a self-defined liberal) he blames too many rules and regulations of the 1970s as a reason why we are in our current situation (eg: California). The ‘abundance’ mindset has been explored in other areas, such as sales, psychology, etc.

Truths: The Future of America First, Vivek Ramaswamy (2025)

I tend not to read political books written by folks running for office because they are usually just loaded with platitudes, but I really liked Nation of Victims (2022), given my memoir is rooted in rejecting the victimhood narrative. What I appreciated in this book is that Vivek is an offensive player, answering “What are we for?” instead of being Mr. No. He is six months younger than me (we both turned 40 this year) and also from the Rust Belt, so I can see we are both shaped by events like 9/11, the Iraq War, and the Great Recession.

Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, Joan C Williams (2025).

I actually emailed Joan after reading White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, and she would have put me in this new book had it not already gone to print. The author is really good at identifying problems within the Democratic Party, but even as part of the Brahmin Left, to me, she still has her heels dug into some of the niche identity politics that I can say would not resonate in the multiethnic working-class community in which I was raised.

A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, Timothy Egan (2024).

As a Hoosier, I think reading about the KKK is a mandatory exercise given their influence on state politics in the 1920s. After reading James H. Madison’s The Indiana Way: A State History (2000) in 2010, I picked up Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana (2018) earlier this year, but haven’t read it yet. Instead, I finished his other book, The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland (2020). Egan’s book gained significant traction and became a New York Times bestseller. While books about the Klan are not new, I enjoyed the highly detailed storytelling of different characters, issues, and rivalries. This era in American history deserves more attention because it’s often oversimplified to drive certain political narratives. There is always more than meets the eye when you finally get a peek behind the curtain.

The Dispossessed: America’s Underclass From The Civil War To The Present, Jacqueline Jones (1993).

This was a random find during my deep dive into black and white southern migration. Academics promoting a specific and oversimplified political narrative miss opportunities to unify folks through shared experience. This book is filled with a lot of nuance, but my takeaway is that both black and white sharecroppers had much in common as the planter class exploited them. My takeaway is that intergenerational wealth has never been a thing for most Americans, even for those who owned their land like my family.

The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People (1973)

It’s no secret that Gary, Indiana, is my favorite city with a fascinating history. Early dives into the 50+ ethnicities that arrived at the turn of the 20th century always send me down a rabbit hole. It’s important to know that the U.S had virtually zero immigration policy from 1800 to 1900. This book gives a finger-tip feel into the daily lives of these people and what they did to survive. The documentary Forgotten Ellis Island encapsulates the harsh realities of discrimination coming to America and early practices of eugenics.

American Steel: Hot Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt (1991)

U.S Steel laid off my dad during their mass consolidation in the 1980s, but at the same time, a new company came on the scene. This book blends storytelling with history to tell how Nucor entered the steel business in the late 80s, took a very different turn from its business model by bringing electric-arc furnaces to the sheet metal industry, and built its first large plant in Crawfordsville, Indiana. They are now the largest steel manufacturer and recycler in North America. It was neat to meet some of their staff and lobbyists earlier this year.

Fiscal Democracy in America: How a Balanced Budget Amendment Can Restore Sound Governance, Kurt Couchman (2025)

Okay, I had to have one really nerdy read in this list. Kurt Couchman is a friend and served as my right-hand man for six years during my tenure in the U.S. Senate. I was an early reviewer of this book in draft form and believe it provides an excellent foundation for those looking to understand how the federal government budgets and what is needed to put our country back on a path to fiscal solvency. You won’t find a more thoughtful human being in such an esoteric space.

Bonus - The Last Adieu: Lafayette’s Triumphant Return, the Echoes of Revolution, and the Gratitude of the Republic, Ryan L Cole (2025)

Completely forgot this on my original post due to how busy I have been this fall but I would remiss if I didn’t include this book written by a fellow Hoosier.

Lafayette was a French military officer and politician who volunteered to join the Continental Army, in American Revolutionary War. Although born of high status, was ahead of his time in championing the abolition of slavery and his return to the U.S. as the “Nation’s Guest” was well received as he travel all (then) 24 states. In October, I attended a great interview Ryan had with Indiana Historical Society CEO, Jody Blankenship. To play off the subtitle of ‘gratitude’, I am thankful for all the writing help Ryan has given me over the years.

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There is something to be said about the resiliency of folks from Crittenden. The county’s population peaked in 1900, and little economic development has occurred since the decline of the tobacco industry and fluorspar mines, which were completely replaced by foreign imports in 1985, the year I was born. There is one thing that has transcended both space and time, however, and that is the timeless principles of Western Kentuckians. Although I was raised more than 300 miles north as a second-generation Hoosier in the heart of steel country, I can attest that the rural way of life continues to guide and influence my behavior.

After the Lewis & Clark Expedition was completed, my ancestor Sgt. John Ordway relocated from New Hampshire to New Madrid and recruited family to join him. After the earthquakes of 1811-1812, his widowed sister-in-law, Elizabeth, quickly remarried and moved to Piney Fork in the newly created Caldwell County. Her oldest son, Daniel Jr., is buried in the Hill Cemetery in Fredonia along the most northern route of the Trail of Tears, where he lived to see the Civil War. Within a decade after slavery was abolished, the area became almost entirely white.

During their 150-year residency, Ordways migrated north along Rt. 641, but no further than Marion. With the exception of a few livery stables, an ice store, and a machine shop, the vast majority of my predecessors were farmers. The Press tracks their movements over the years, attending church, weddings, birthday parties, and funerals, among other community events.

They were steeped in the Agrarian Tradition, where economic, social, and political systems centered on agriculture as the primary means of existence. This way of life was popularized by Wendell Berry in Henry County, Kentucky. Still, agrarians from the 1930s warned southerners about how work in the industrial north eroded culture in pursuit of titles, status, and materialism. This focus on faith, family, and community is the glue that kept Ordways rooted in such practices; however, economics would force change upon them.

It wasn’t until the Second Industrial Revolution at the turn of the twentieth century that the mechanization of agriculture took off. My great-grandfather, Virgil Ordway, was forced to pull one foot out of the family farm in Crayne and put it into the spar mines shortly after the Black Patch Tobacco Wars. Industrial life would be challenging, as organized labor did not arrive in the area until after the Second World War. Environmental protections for both workers and the land were still decades away.

In 1960, The Press reported that 10 years earlier (in 1950), the mine business was finished, and men only had two options for employment: go to Gary, Indiana, or find another mine in Eastern Kentucky. After returning from the Korean War, Papaw Hollis saw that Crittenden was unchanged. It was then that he decided to head north for a job at U.S. Steel, where he worked at the Sheet & Tin mill for 33 years.

He and Mamaw (Virginia) brought their values and lifestyle north. After years of renting in the City of Gary, they bought a very modest 864 sq ft house in neighboring East Gary (renamed Lake Station in 1977), which had a southern feel with its greenways and blueways. They resided in the last house on a dead-end street next to both woods and sand dunes. It was here that the Ordways recreated their Kentucky life, complete with a big yard where they planted oak, walnut, and pine trees. In addition, they had a white tin shed, a small red barn shed, a burn barrel, and a seasonal garden, which they shared with their neighbors.

Northerners called all white southern migrants “hillbillies” due to their accent and dialect, but the folks of western Kentucky are “flatlanders,” with a culture very different from their Appalachian counterparts. Their history and oral narratives are best captured in the book Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles by author Chad Berry, now a Vice President at Berea College.

Even though The Press advertised that more than 50 Crittenden County migrants attended a Baptist Church in East Gary, my grandparents fell away from the faith for a time. Instead, Papaw found community through his membership in the United Steelworkers Union (USW).

Both my dad and I were raised in that little house where the southern identity remained fully intact. Mamaw and Papaw would retire back to Crayne in the late 1980s, a common practice among many Kentucky migrants, as the north was never home for them.

After living with my grandparents for a year between 1987-1988, I would visit every summer until I was 12 and hunt deer with my dad in Sheridan until 1999. Given the intimate nature of The Press, my arrivals were noted by the paper twice. While I never looked forward to working in the family garden at Aunt Mary’s house on Lily Dale Dr., I enjoyed our visits with locals like Dean Akridge at his supply store in Fredonia. Mamaw even promised trips to the toy aisle of Walmart in the “big city” of Paducah if I’d let the local barber shop cut off my rat tail.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I noticed a tension between a Southern Culture of Honor and a Northern Culture of Dignity when it comes to what proper behavior looks like within one’s family and the greater community. My rite of passage into manhood was a strict standard set by dad and foreign to the peers of my childhood. The convergence of high-speed internet, smartphones, and social media, as well as the breakdown of the traditional family unit, has significantly eroded such practices.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I delivered the commencement address at my alma mater, River Forest, a school that was quickly established in the late 1950s due to rapid southern white migration. My speech was based on wisdom given to me in 2005 by my (late) great uncle Charles Aldridge of Marion. He said, “never be ashamed of what you do for a living,” and “never forget where you come from.” Those phrases have never left me, and one thing I noticed about Ordways is that they never chased materialism or status, yet they live much longer and happier lives than folks in the north.

While I split time between Gary and Indianapolis today, my last eight years were spent in Washington, D.C., mostly working in the U.S. Senate. It was there that I read The Fall of Kentucky’s Rock: Western Kentucky Democratic Politics since the New Deal.

To summarize the book, local TV, radio, and newspapers have been eroded by technology, and now all our media comes from Washington. With places like Cave-In-Rock, Western Kentucky was once a dangerous frontier. Some industrial development came after, but the people never really prospered as commerce moved away, as more rail lines traversed the nation. FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) helped the locals build roads, which they would later use to leave; however, his electric cooperative grants did bring Crittenden out of the dark ages, literally. Other than that, political elites at the national level erased what little economic activity existed, looked down on their religious convictions, and some dared to label such a group with “white privilege.” This caused Crittenden’s political views to pivot, but in the Jackson Purchase, voters did an about-face after 200 years of being named the state’s “gibraltar of democracy.”

For thousands of years, human customs and practices were shaped at the local level, rather than by overeducated individuals in a faraway land, that lacks input from a community’s unique lived experiences. While we might not always agree with our local media, outlets like The Press are critical to facilitating community conversations as they are far more productive than arguing with strangers on the internet.

Given her hardscrabble upbringing, Mamaw often said to “make do or do without” and reminded me not to become “too big for my britches” in my successes. Papaw and Dad also contributed to my development by encouraging me to think for myself and problem-solve through expectations like, “Son, figure it out,” and rhetorical questions such as, “Son, do I have to draw you a picture?” It is their actions, putting principles into practice and leading by example, which have enabled me to become a contributing member of society. Such behavior may appear primitive to the outsider, but the values of Crittenden County are timeless. It has been said, “You can take the boy out of Kentucky, but you can’t take the Kentucky out of the boy.” For Dad and me, Kentucky was always at the center of our identity. I am fortunate to have such a traditional upbringing and plan to advocate for this simple life because of the deep meaning and purpose it has given me.

Okay, I’m really going to finish this book!

After shutting down the clothing store and moving to DC in January 2017, I was freed from several commitments; however, landing in the legal center at the Heritage Foundation during the Gorsuch nomination proved how ill-equipped I was at technical writing… and writing fast. Given that I wasn’t raised in the church, my book research continued with some deep dives on both Christianity and masculinity as they tied into my family’s southern Culture of Honor. (Many are listed on my Goodreads.)

It was not on my bingo card, but by happenstance, I landed a job in the U.S. Senate two years later. During my interview, I told the incoming chief of staff I was writing a book about my Dad. After using one of Dad’s favorite phrases, “skin in the game,” several times and citing my political hero Mitch Daniels and his concerns related to the federal budget, I was hired on the spot. With no federal policy background, the learning curve was steep, so extra hours at work, along with an annoying Metro train commute home, meant the book would quickly find its way back to the back bench.

When COVID-19 hit a year later, it felt like I was always working, as emails came from every direction and at all hours of the night. With everything on lockdown, I took up cycling as a way to get out of the house, but it also pulled my attention back to the book. That summer, I delivered a commencement address to the graduates of my alma mater. It was an opening act from my book to express sentiments about the world through the lens of my Kentucky ancestors.

The Art of Writing

I was a mess with all of my handwritten notes, Word Documents, Apple Notes, Google Keep, and the like. As a supporter of fellow Millennial author Ryan Holiday, I adopted his Notecard System to organize my thoughts and incorporate many concepts from the books I've read over the years.

The problem was that every time I left home to work at a coffee shop, there was no way to bring my corkboard along, much less my deck of notecards, so the writing was all over the place. All that changed when I came across the software Scrivener. It completely changed my confidence. The digital binder, note cards, corkboard, and outline are all one and the same, which allows fluidity between the organization of ideas and drafts.

I finally started talking to book agents, and they told me that if I wanted to land a traditional book deal instead of self-publishing, I would need a book proposal, so I picked up a book on the subject. This is essentially a business plan to illustrate “how this book is going to make money”... that is, for the publisher, of course.

New York Times Bestselling book agents will give you EXACT OPPOSITE advice which is frustrating so I started reaching out to friends. This is when the Chief of Staff of (then) Secretary Carson connected me with his book agent, Sealy Yates who is most well known for published the OG Christian book on masculinity, Wild at Heart. After telling him my story, Sealy sent me of another book he published that has continued to shape my faith, The Luckiest Man: How a Seventeen-Year Battle with ALS Led Me to Intimacy with God. I ended buying online courses from him through www.AuthorCoaching.com.

While working through my proposal, I came across one required section called chapter summaries. Ryan Holiday suggested I connect with his friend Tucker Max’s company, Scribe, a self-publishing company put on the map by David Goggins’ memoir, Can’t Hurt Me. I bought their book, The Scribe Method, but was unable to record and “talk my way” through the book draft, much less a summary. I realized the only way to get it done was to bang out an entire draft of 85,000 words, then back into the summaries. This took a year, working every Saturday at the Library of Congress. Some of my Substack pieces are pulled from that draft as a way to test pilot a “proof of concept.” I borrowed this practice from one of my favorite NYT Bestselling authors, Nassim Taleb, who often put working drafts online.

Vance’s book inspired so many others to write their own stories that I’ve said many times there should be a section at the bookstore called ‘Millennial Trauma Memoir. ’ Storytelling is part of my family’s southern culture, but writing has never been my thing. It’s not theirs either, as I’ve traveled to Kentucky several times on fact-finding missions only to learn the Ordways didn’t write a whole lot down in the 150 years they spent within a few square miles between two counties.

Book proposals also require a section on “sales comparatives” to demonstrate that a book is similar to others in terms of its market appeal, while also being distinct and able to stand on its own. Beyond that, writing prose is unique to each person, so I decided to dive into other memoirs for further depth and analysis. I hope you’ll enjoy this list with little blurbs about each and how they have informed or helped me along the path.

Currently, my book proposal is being revised for my target audience. The first version, completed last fall, landed the work too far into the Christian Self-Help category. While there are strong faith-based themes interwoven throughout the book, my thesis is more geared to the complex yet growing multiethnic working class in which I was raised, and runs parallel to the story of my Dad’s values and parenting.

Back in 2012, I’d settled on Hillbilly Ebonics and fixated on the title, but now it was too close to Hillbilly Elegy. After 2016, there were more “hillbilly” memoirs out there, such as Hillbilly Odyssey and Revolutionary Hillbilly. In 2021, I changed the working title to Millrat because it incorporated not just my Dad but all blue-collar working-class blacks and whites, along with the more than 50 ethnicities that arrived within years of the founding of Gary, Indiana. Despite Millrat being an all-encompassing derogatory term, it is unifying, as downtrodden people have always found a way to turn stereotypes and discrimination into badges of honor. For instance, people in Northwest Indiana are from the Calumet Region and referred to as Region Rats. Kids from my high school, River Forest, are often referred to by rivals as River Rats.

With this broader look, including the people both Dad and I were raised with, along with the generations that came before us, I will be re-pitching a new book proposal to agents and publishers this fall. Steel changed the world during the 20th century and was made by people of all kinds. It is my duty to tell the world about the grit and resilience of those folks..

Regardless of your views about J.D. Vance, his politics, or his story, agents have told me time and time again that his writing is king and that his memoir continues to inspire the completion of my work. For those looking for diverse perspectives on his book, several are included in Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (2019).

Stay tuned for the next 2-part series, as I’ve taken extra time to compare my life to Hillbilly Elegy (Part 1), add cultural commentary to the book from my own research along with a list of those books. (Part 2).

(Author’s Note: a few were not actually written by Millennials, but recommended by them!)

Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, Rob Henderson, 2024. This was #1 on my 2024 Christmas Reading List. After reading the book, I listened to the entire audiobook on day 2 of “Robert’s Ride” fundraiser, where I cycled from D.C. to the Indiana Dunes over 10 days. Rob was so gracious to share with me his book proposal, and he did a Zoom call with me from an Airbnb in NYC on his second day after returning to the U.S. from years across the pond in Oxford. His book agent, Dylan Colligan from Javelin, is also an amazing person who has given me way too much free advice. I am deeply indebted to my cycling brother Brady for making that introduction back in May of 2023.

Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness, Carrie Sheffield, 2024. I read this because of Carrie’s conviction to use her book to spread the word of Christ. Sincerely appreciate her sharing her book proposal. It was a real treat to meet her in person recently during a trip to D.C. She has a great Substack and continues to impress me with her work.

Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit, Eliese Colette Goldbach, 2020. This book would have done much better had it not come out a week before COVID started. Her experience in the steel mills of Cleveland is 100% spot on from my own as a contractor of Indiana Harbor Works. I also appreciated her battle with Bipolar Disorder, where I saw similarities to my own mother’s challenges. I emailed her a few times, but never heard back.

Between Two Trailers: A Memoir, Dana Trent, 2024. Read this one because Dana is a fellow Hoosier. Appreciated that despite moving away, her books pay homage to Indiana and its people, who made her into the person she is today. I have yet to meet her, but we have had some good interactions on social media.

Leaving Cloud 9: The True Story of a Life Resurrected from the Ashes of Poverty, Trauma, and Mental Illness, Ericka Andersen, 2018. Enjoyed this “third-party” memoir about her husband. Ericka is a fellow Hoosier, took the first crack at editing my book proposal, and offered the critical feedback I needed from a faith-based perspective. Ericka has a new book, Freely Sober: Rethinking Alcohol Through the Lens of Faith, coming out Jan 6, 2026.

Heartland, Sarah Smarsh, 2018. While the book has unnecessary political commentary and what I consider to be the OG “counter memoir” to Hillbilly Elegy, I really value Sarah’s commentary about how folks that “use their hands” are devalued in the U.S. She mentions the book took her 15 years which gives me confidence that sometimes a good work product takes a while. In 2024, she released a collection of her previous writings in Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class.

Reprogramming the American Dream: From Rural America to Silicon Valley―Making AI Serve Us All, Kevin, Scott, 2020. This is another book that I believe underperformed because of its release during COVID. I read it because J.D. Vance wrote the foreword, but also enjoyed the pivot from memoir to policy prescriptions in the technology space that should help the Rust Belt.

Eyes to the Wind, Ady Barkan, 2019. It's an intriguing memoir of a progressive millennial political activist, but I read it because of his raw accounting of dealing with ALS. Ady passed away from the disease in 2023 and was just two years older than me, a further reminder that your life can turn on a dime at a moment's notice.

Holler Rat: A Memoir, Anya Leftig, 2023. Like J.D. Vance and me, Anya spent her summers in Kentucky, so I found her dual life as a Jew from Connecticut to be a fun read. Thankful she took the time to do a Zoom call with me, whereas she sold her book to a publisher on the manuscript alone without a proposal, which is pretty rare.

Educated: A Memoir - Tara Westover, 2022. A NYT Bestseller, I was interested in the family dynamics of those living a fairly isolated lifestyle and how those people break out of a small world culture and upbringing. Her mom’s 2020 counter memoir, Educating, is a reminder that family may not like your story, and to acknowledge that we all have different perspectives from experiencing the same events.

Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line - Ben Hamper, 1991. Since my Dad was laid off by U.S. Steel in the 80s, I wanted to understand the perspective of someone who lived and experienced the manufacturing decline of that decade. Ben’s crass language is something I can relate to as a steel kid.

Clear Springs: A Family Story - Bobbie Ann Mason, 1999. This selection was based on the fact that Bobbie writes about a story of a Kentucky farm family and her focus on heritage, place, and family roots. I see many similarities between her family legacy and my own.

Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future, Pete Buttigieg, 2019. Read this because Pete is a fellow Hoosier, and we both have a lot of local government experience. This was written with presidential ambitions in mind, and his dark-horse run for DNC chair was the most ingenious way to short-circuit the brand-building process on a national level.

The Glass Castle: A Memoir, Jeannette Walls, 2006. The Google algorithms brought this one to me. It shows the talent of a father who, when sober, really empowered his kids. I like the depth of family loyalty in this one, but it also shows how the lack of family stability and location affects children.

The Liar’s Club: A Memoir, Mary Karr, 1995. Another book brought to me by the internet because it’s one of the OG books that helped establish the memoir category. To be honest, I never finished the book because I was more interested in her 2015 release, The Art of Memoir. That book was very helpful when it comes to dealing with family, lawsuits, and other implications related to “tell-all” types of stories.

Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business: Boxing and the Art of Life, Ed Latimore, 2025. Years earlier, I read Ed’s self-published Not Caring What Other People Think Is A Superpower: Insights From a Heavyweight Boxer (2017) and Sober Letters to my Drunken Self (2018). Ed was gracious enough to send me his book proposal, which landed him a handsome book advance. It was good to finally meet him in person as I stopped in Pittsburgh during my relocation from DC to Indiana in December 2024. I let him release a guest post on my Substack when his book came out as a way to say thank you.

All Over but the Shoutin’, Rick Bragg, 1998. Read this per the recommendation of a book agent Dylan Colligan. Bragg details his upbringing in rural Alabama, his mother's sacrifices, and his journey from poverty to becoming a celebrated writer for The New York Times. The book is a tribute to his strong mother, who worked tirelessly to support her three sons, and explores themes of poverty, family, class, and the power of perseverance and storytelling to overcome adversity.

Unlike my peers, my childhood was “distinctly southern.” There were no written house rules, but expectations were made clear with “Boy, don’t make me tell you twice,” and I often referred to Dad as “sir” in our conversations.

Unlike the beatings from other subcultures, the threat of violence from a belt or paddle was sufficient for behavior correction. During my summer visits to Kentucky, Papaw had me pick out my own switch on a few occasions. He started skinning the branch with his pocket knife, but it was never used.

Dad morphed a southern phrase, “that burns me up,” into “that burns my ass.” Both he and Papaw would roll their tongue and bite it, which usually meant a ‘head thumpin’ (flick) was en route. They called them “attention getters,” which were quite effective.

There were no chore lists, just the expectation to help dad with whatever needed to be done. He often called the one-offs “projects”. When you don’t come from money, the ability to hire out work is a rarity. This led to dad’s often-used phrase, “Son, figure it out.”

Yardwork started at an early age with mowing, weed eating, and caring for two large outside dogs. This was intermingled with 4x4 wood stacking for the fire pit, trimming trees, controlled burns behind the fence (which always got the fire department called out), cleaning gutters, and quartering deer in the garage, among other things. We also ‘tinkered’ with anything mechanical like cars and lawnmowers. Dad enjoyed watching the tiller drag me along on the first few passes in the Spring before we planted the seasonal garden. Months later, routine weeding would ensue. I even had to drag a 55-gallon trash can that weighed more than me from behind the garage, down the driveway, and to the street each week.

If friends stopped by, Dad would put us to work, and I always tried to convince them to stay: the faster we got things done, the sooner we could play. I was never paid an allowance, but Dad never let a real need go unfulfilled. He said no to about 99% of my requests with a firm, “Don’t ask me again.”

Papaw fell away from the church after migrating north, and Dad didn’t engage the spiritual world until after he got ALS, despite the many religious items hanging in our house. The union did not replace their religion, but the brotherhood is well captured in the chapter Steel Family Memories and the Culture of Unionists in Striking Steel. Dad’s friend group was small, but loyalty was everything to him. (another cultural concept of southern honor). Dad learned that virtue from Papaw, who invited over men (often times black) and worked on their cars while refusing to charge them anything. That sentiment is well stated in Black Freedom Fighters in Steel where Gary Sheet & Tin interviewee, George Kimbly (a black man) said, “People helped each other, and a guy would come up to you and ask you for a dime or a nickel, and it you had it, you’d give it to them, white or black.”

In 1996 and 1997, we helped two Hungarian brothers build houses (yes, I know exactly where I was when Tupac was killed). I recall my dad saying, “Don’t stand around with your hands in your pocket,” which led to another principle: “Son, never stand around and watch another man work.” He believed every man should get his hands dirty, and once made fun of me for having soft hands. If you’ve ever met a steelworker, the years of labor turn their fingers into thick calloused sausages. We spent a few times at one of their new houses turning deer into sausage links, a laborious activity in its own right, where I learned pig intestines were used as casing.

Many Americans talk about their rights and privileges, but never the implied duties and responsibilities my Dad often spoke about when it comes to how we ought to live and treat others in civil society.

In junior high, the building trades and IBEW came to my junior high, and given how much I loved RC cars, I was convinced that I’d become an electrician. It was a profession where I could utilize both my hands and mind, without worrying about the outsourcing that was happening. After dad was diagnosed with ALS, thinking about what I wanted to do with my life all but stopped as we went into survival mode. Interestingly enough, the trades would endorse me for local office nearly 20 years later.

After his disease took full root, dad’s forced voluntary hardship in the early years prepared me mentally and physically to handle anything that might come my way. I now had to run our outside operation and was fully prepared, or so I thought…

In my junior year, I forgot to put oil in our new John Deere tractor, and it blew up after one pass around the yard. That summer, I had to push-mow and bag the clippings, which took hours each week. In fashion, Dad said, “Son, you only need to learn once.”

It was this blue-collar, working-class upbringing and countless hours spent with Dad outside that developed my mechanical aptitude and spatial reasoning. It led to a high score on the ASVAB and non-stop calls from the military after 9/11, where I eventually signed up for the U.S. Navy’s Delayed Entry Program.

After I was awarded the Lilly Endowment Community Scholarship, going to war in Iraq, which had just started, was off the table, as it was clear I was going to college. My chemistry teacher offered me the opportunity to work for her husband, Mr. Hooks, who owned an engineering firm that serviced the local steel mills.

Knowing that I would spend time in the mill, I thought it was counter to everything Dad had taught me. Luckily, most of my work was done in the office, where I focused on design and detail work, including drafting and CAD.

I was afraid to leave my dad’s side (that loyalty thing), so to avoid this opportunity, I cooked up a lie that my dad needed a letter to know what I would be doing. It completely backfired. When I showed it to him, he said, “Son, looks like you have yourself a job!” The school let me skip nearly two classes a day, my last semester of senior year, for work. Some kids were upset that I got to leave to ‘make money.’

I spent 2003-2015 working full-time in the summers and part-time in college/grad school as a contractor for Indiana Harbor Works, which underwent several ownership changes during my tenure. The experience in various parts of the mill gave me a deep respect for the folks who were employed there. Laboring day to day in a mill is best captured by my fellow Millennial in Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit (2020), who spent a few years at Cleveland Cliffs during the Great Recession.

I did not appreciate Dad’s words of wisdom until nearly a year after he died, when I transferred to Valparaiso University and read Studs Terkel’s Working (1974) as part of the core curriculum. I was triggered by the interview of a worker from U.S. Steel, Steve Dubi – “I told my sons, ‘If you ever wind up in that steel mill like me, I’m gonna hit you right over the head. Don’t be foolish. Go get yourself a schooling. Stay out of the steel mill or you’ll wind up the same way I did.’”

His son, Father Leonard Dubi, reiterated those sentiments in the following interview - I know my father had much more potential, but he was locked into a system day after day, and he didn’t want to see me get locked in. He encouraged me to go to college ”to make something of yourself” were the words he used.

It was the same sentiment that led to the demise of a union reformer's campaign in Northwest Indiana. Ed Sadlowski ran to represent District 31, but his campaign was hurt by an interview for Penhouse magazine where he commented that he didn’t want his children to be steelworkers and that no one should work in a steel mill.

In many writings, there are many mentions of the ‘golden handcuffs’ put on the men who worked in the mill,but they couldn’t get out because the money was too good. Some get trapped by the ‘overtime game’ as they choose a lifestyle of fancy boats, lifted trucks, or just love a big bank account.

In I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, (1930), the 12 contributors repeatedly state their concerns about endless labor in the industrial north, leading to a worship of consumption and indulgence. I think they are right. I am fortunate that both dad and papaw were never driven by materialism and rarely worked more than 40 hours, so they could enjoy time with family or pursue hobbies. Many steelworkers might acquire a generous pension, but rarely live long enough to enjoy it. Dad also said, “You can always make more money, but you can never get back time.”

I fulfilled Dad’s wish and became the first in the family to complete my undergraduate degree in Finance in December 2007, but it was nothing short of theory rooted in ‘free market fundamentalism,’ where all that mattered was ‘maximizing shareholder value.’ Workers were reduced to mere numbers on an Excel spreadsheet in one of my classes called cost accounting.

The Great Recession led me back to graduate school, where I completed my master’s degree in International Commerce & Policy in August 2010. It was here that my upbringing was vindicated. The theory of “comparative advantage," where countries benefit by specializing in certain goods and services, makes sense, that is, until you learn how governments subsidize industries, steal intellectual property, and practice unequal standards when it comes to labor and environmental protections.

Given the complex history of labor in America, many would be well served to read the 674-page book, There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America. With that, my views always have and will remain highly nuanced in the space despite the simpleton’s binary approach in Washington, D.C.

Today, I look back at the labor rituals I performed at home, in line with the many Ordways that came before me, along with the organized labor within the steel mills that provided my family with a path out of western Kentucky, where the population and economic opportunities peaked in 1900. Steel completely changed human civilization during the 20th century. I honor this multi-racial working class and their labor with the title of my memoir, Millrat.

Dad didn’t read much outside of the local newspaper. Still, he would have agreed with Frederick Douglass’ quote, "It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men." (1855) In addition, dad implicitly practiced and taught me to embrace President Teddy Roosevelt's lifelong philosophy of The Strenuous Life.

While they say good times make weak men, I am here to report that my childhood in the 1990s was indeed a time of good times, but that didn’t stop Dad from making me into a hard man.

Similarly, there is a cyclical theory that hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.

There are many ways to analyze this theory in relation to Christianity and Masculinity, but I’ve cut out 1,000 words to keep this piece focused.

For Ordways, the four cycles are completely foreign to them. Good times are never taken for granted, and hard times are where life’s best lessons are learned. In fact, voluntary hardship is mandatory to pass into manhood. I attribute such resistance to the easy life to our family’s culture, derived from The Agrarian Tradition, which has many virtues, one deeply rooted in labor.

It’s in the blood

In another Substack piece, I trace the Ordway’s lineage back to indentured servitude, where James became one of the first settlers of Newbury, Massachusetts. One hundred fifty years later, Sgt John Ordway would journal for 863 days straight on the Lewis & Clark Expedition as they traveled over 8,000 miles by canoe, horseback, and foot. His relocation to New Madrid and the subsequent earthquakes would push the Ordways into the Black Patch of western Kentucky, where they lived for the next 150 years. It’s a place where the tobacco wars would be fought during the childhood of my great-grandfather, Virgil.

Four Generations of Hard Men – No Turning, No Cycles

Virgil Ordway 1896-1983

I can only describe western Kentucky as a hard-scrabble place. Much like Appalachia, the Industrial Revolution came and went with little participation from them. A few Ordways owned livery stables, an ice company, and a machine shop, but the vast majority were small-scale farmers.

According to my research, Ordways rarely owned more than 100 acres. When you consider the size of their families (8-12), it was imperative to live frugally in order to acquire more land that would ultimately be split up and worked by the children. There was no real wealth accumulation for the farmer, as a job begets a job each generation, unless one had owned slaves 50 years or more earlier.

Crittenden became 99% white within 5 years after the Civil War. For those who had money, they would transition their business during the second industrial revolution with mechanization, or as I like to call it, the rise of the machines (a subtitle of Terminator 3). Small-scale farmers like Virgil got pushed aside. To survive, he took one foot out of farming and put it in the fluorspar mines (‘spar is what locals call it), whereas the Illinois-Kentucky District produced 40% of the world’s fluorite, a desirable mineral used in the steelmaking process.

Eastern Kentucky is the more renowned part of the state due to the Harlan County War, as well as numerous Appalachian studies conducted by colleges, universities, and the federal government. There, coal miners fought to organize unions, but at the same time, in western Kentucky, the local paper, the Crittenden Press, had no coverage of labor strife. Any small farmer with debt during the time of the Great Depression was crushed, so a job from FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a savior for many in the area. Even after decades of work, Virgil was still a groundsman, but with federal labor laws finally in place, the spar mines would be unionized as they hit record production during World War II.

Hollis Ordway 1931-1999

Like his dad, Papaw Hollis would also have a hardscrabble upbringing. Luckily, his six-month-younger second cousin, Bruce, is still alive (93) to talk about their early years. Bruce grew up across the street from Hollis and was born at home because the county didn't have a hospital. There was no electricity, so they used Aladdin lamps to light the house. Lanterns were required to find the outhouse in the dark since there was no plumbing. Heat came from coal, and ice boxes were the norm. Most meals consisted of beans, and sometimes mustard was added to ‘fancy them up.’ Bruce used cardboard as inserts when he wore holes through his shoes. Hard times indeed.

Work ethic is hardwired into the Ordway ethos through parenting. It was no surprise to me, and it garnered a chuckle to pull up the 1950 census and see the 18-year-old papaw Hollis listed as working on the farm 60 hours a week, as his dad labored in the mines.

After returning from the Korean War, Papaw observed that western Kentucky remained unchanged. Big Steel lobbied the federal government to import (mostly from China), so the fluorspar mines were crushed. Another one of FDR’s WPA programs would support road building, and my papaw’s generation would use them to leave (often called Hillbilly Highways). Ironically, he would work for one of the companies that helped destroy mine production in the U.S, which ceased all production in 1985, the year I was born.

Luckily for Papaw, he was part of the second wave of the Great White Migration, a subject that has not been fully explored. By then, unions such as USW Local 1066 were already strong when he landed employment at U.S. Steel’s Sheet & Tin Mill at Gary Works. The 1959 Great Steel Strike was the largest in U.S. history. It was a battle over work rules that could result in reduced hours or job cuts for employees assigned to a particular task. The strike that occurred just a few years earlier involved 500,000 nationwide. The EPA did not exist during his early years at the mill, so the pollution of both water and air was terrible for steelworkers' health. (And it still is.)

After 33 years in the mill, Papaw would return to Kentucky, a common practice for southerners (both black and white) who acknowledged that, culturally, the North was never home. With family roots now planted in the north, Mamaw saw it differently, but she would not be the final decision-maker. Either way, they gifted the house to my Dad and uncle.

Doug Ordway 1958-2003

Dad would also be exposed to the family grind during childhood. The house and yard would reflect Kentucky transplants, complete with a large yard, a tin shed, a burn barrel, and a seasonal garden. Dad also entered the Gary Works Sheet & Tin Mill, but the 1980s were unkind to labor, with imports, automation, and consolidation leading to permanent job losses. Dad would be laid off but gained employment a county over at Metro Metals, a steel finishing plant. According to one of his friends, when U.S. Steel called back to rehire, he took a pass.

Dad would leave the USW but would join the International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA). He was not one to promote brands but displayed his union sticker on his truck with pride. Even though his work environment was clean, it’s well known that shift-work can still wreak havoc on the body. Dad never complained. An informal rule of Ordway parenting is “no whining” regardless of circumstances. Even with a punch card, Dad believed in showing up early and leaving late for all things in life, including work – the opposite of a South’s liesurely cadence.

During a few fishing trips, his friends would drop me off at the mill as he finished up the midnight shift, so we could take off to the small lakes of Wisconsin or Michigan. I saw exactly what my Dad did all day (and night) long and distinctly remember him stating, “You don’t ever want to be in this line of work.” As a union man, he believed in “an honest day's wage for an honest day's work.” Still, his unwavering belief in meritocracy put him at odds with the union’s strict adherence to seniority. The union also protected people he thought were lazy, creating an unsafe work environment for all. He wasn’t into filing grievances, though, as tattling to third parties (a product of the north’s Culture of Dignity) is an affront to personal honor where men handle their own business “mano a mano.”

As the Industrial Age gave way and the Information Age took full root with the internet, my childhood may have been different. Not a chance.

Read Part 2.

Coming off an election loss in November 2015 took me all of 24 hours to get over given my ‘why’ but 2016 was one of the hardest years of my life. Between a house fire, engaged in a friend’s defamation lawsuit, the sudden ending of a long-term relationship, an estranged family member, a business in disrepair, and nearly running myself out of money, I was tapped out. That genetic propensity for suicide from mom’s side of the family reared its head for the first time since 2000-2001, when Dad was in full decline from ALS. I knew if I didn’t hit the eject button from the business and the community writ large, something might happen.

There was one glimmer of inspiration that also prompted my abrupt exit from Northwest Indiana, and it was the book Hillbilly Elegy. Author J.D. Vance mentioned things that explained exactly why I wasn’t getting my memoir done after picking at it for the better part of 15 years. In the introduction, he said “... for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.”

He noted in the conclusion, “For nearly two decades, I suffered from a terrible recurring nightmare.” (related to his childhood trauma). Those two lines explained exactly how I felt and they were a reminder that year after year, time and time again, I picked up the pencil only to put it back down, failing my Dad by not telling his story. Perhaps if I changed my environment, things would be different…

An Introvert Has To Read

I will not belabor the closing of my clothing store, as that is for another time, but I will say working “retail anything” as an owner is not for the weary. As a self-described introvert, I can go hard in the paint working and socializing long hours during the week, but if I don’t get one personal day to myself, I am insufferable to be around: short, cold, and mechanical. Playing weekend warrior as a seasonal salesman at Brooks Brothers and J.Crew from 2009 to 2012 was a fun hobby, but selling clothes for a few hours is very different from running the entire operation. One of my favorite ways to recharge is by reading in solitude, something that wasn’t possible as a business owner.

During the summer of 2016, a few people told me Hillbilly Elegy reminded them of me. Late one Saturday night, after closing the store, I purchased it online along with a slew of other books that were on my mind. My house was still being rebuilt several months after the fire, so I brought the books to the store and set them on the shelf as decorations. Given the demands of the job, it would be mid-October before I became acquainted with Vance’s work, but I also felt compelled to finish Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking beforehand.

I ended up reading his entire book in one sitting, marked it up like a textbook, then added it to my 2016 annual Christmas Reading List. It was formatted identically to the one Mitch Daniels published annually during his tenure as Indiana Governor. One part of me was overjoyed that someone might understand my story, and the other was annoyed that his book came out first, given the parallels of our lives and the fact that I had a really big head start. Looking back, I’m glad it took another eight years (all in DC) to refine my thoughts on a few matters.

The Evolution of a Memoir: A 20-year process

Deep in the archives of my iCloud are pieces of writing in various Word documents, dating back to 2004, and they continue to be reworked for this Substack.

I didn’t have a working title at the time, but when I started writing my memoir, the book’s focus was on my Dad’s (then) recent death after his five year battle with Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Having a front seat to witness this decline was so painful to bottle up that I often compared it to a soldier returning from war, internalizing the horrors to protect others, while continually damaging themselves. I thought telling my story would take the place of therapy, since I was “too manly” and unwilling to see a real therapist at the time. With writing, I could solve this all on my own. The problem was (and still is) that every time I put pen to paper to detail those five years, I have lucid nightmares that probably qualify as night terrors.

I did a lot more blogging on my personal life via a MySpace account in 2005-2007 after a five-year romantic relationship ended, and I became estranged from my Mother.

Just two weeks after I finished undergrad in December 2007, it was made known to me that my Dad was not my biological father, the biggest family secret to date. It was a painful fact to process, given how close we were. With this new information and several epiphanies related to my genetic proclivities, the working title of the book became My Three Fathers, and expanded to include my Dad, my biological father, and my Father in heaven, reflecting my growth in faith.

2008 was a brutal year with my newly minted yet near-useless finance degree as this period would eventually be called the Great Recession. I was living in Chicago, trying to figure out why I couldn’t find a job despite three internships on my resume, one at the prestigious firm, Merrill Lynch. Studying the government’s role in housing finance, led me directly into politics. With the election cycle full swing, I read John McCain’s "Faith of My Fathers" and Barack Obama’s "Dreams from My Father," along with "The Audacity of Hope." The personal stories of both men inspired me to keep writing, for myself, of course.

I didn’t fully process the new relationship with my father before Mom committed suicide just a year later in January 2009, three days after I started graduate school. I had no time to deal with the pain, so I buried my head in both school and work. The recession took me back to employment in Gary, Indiana, where I spent a lot of time interacting with the locals, nearly all of whom were black. (see SubStack posts Sammy on the South Shore and Drivin’ for Dee)

Driving back and forth through the city every day caused deep intellectual intrigue. Different pieces started coming together in the next few years after I read nearly every book about Gary and its people. (many listed in my Goodreads) Completing Leadership Northwest Indiana also broadened my horizons about The Region, where a classmate asked me to join the board of the Urban League of Northwest Indiana in 2011. A year later, I became a Silver Life Member of the NAACP Gary Branch. My involvement in local politics led me to become the co-chair of the Valparaiso Republican Party and also a Life Member of the NRA. The "contradiction" of my membership choices is long grounded in civil rights and timeless principles. Note: Like a marriage, I don’t agree with all organizations on all issues.

Through fitness classes at the Valpo YMCA in 2012, I became friends with Jay Weinberg, a Jew from Knox in Starke County, one of the poorest in the state. Our conversations led me to start drawing a parallel between the economic issues affecting both working-class whites and blacks in Gary and beyond.

At that time, I had a deep, unexplainable feeling in my gut. I felt more comfortable in a setting with black Democrats in Gary than I did with affluent white Republicans in Valparaiso. What Jay called hill-bonics I called hillbilly ebonics. It was a cultural connection between whites and blacks that nobody was talking about because segregation, which has both forced and voluntary elements, led us to live parallel lives for so long, despite the many commonalities of those southern migrants now living in the Rust Belt.

Years later, when I read Hillbilly Elegy, this racial connection finally came together and sent me researching down a rabbit hole. J.D. Vance is from Middletown, Ohio, a steel city that to this day is predominantly white, has few black residents and never lost population during deindustrialization but he directly quoted the book, Appalachian Odyssey, “It was not simply that the Appalachian migrants, as rural strangers ‘out of place’ in the city, were upsetting to Midwestern, urban whites. Rather, these migrants disrupted a broad set of assumptions held by northern whites about how white people appeared, spoke, and behaved . . . the disturbing aspect of hillbillies was their racialness. Ostensibly, they were of the same racial order (whites) as those who dominated economic, political, and social power in local and national arenas. But hillbillies shared many regional characteristics with the southern blacks arriving in Detroit.”

Further research into my own family’s 150-year history and migration from western Kentucky to Gary in the 1950s helped explain my Southern Culture of Honor and The Agrarian Tradition, both woven into Dad’s parenting style, which led to a different upbringing than that of my peers – another gut feeling I could never fully explain. Many of my white ethnic friends were fully assimilated into northern consumeristic “whiteness,” but I was a product of western Kentucky through and through, just like dad.

The words, expressions, and values system of my grandparents, along with the black folks in Gary, were too similar – backed up by my lived experience and research. In 2014, my memoir title changed to Hillbilly Ebonics. It was two offensive terms married together (I’m known to try to get a rise out of people for my own entertainment), which upset several of my friends and acquaintances.

Some called my use of Ebonics cultural appropriation or offensive. Still, to those who study history well, the roots of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) are at least partially derived from other “white” cultures. This is covered in the book, Talking Back, Talking Black. I emailed the author, a linguist, a few years ago and felt vindicated:

The problem now was that I had too many big ideas and no idea how to sew them together with a cohesive thesis. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge of 2014 opened old wounds out of nowhere. Now that ALS finally received the attention and funding it deserved, my book would focus much more on how my Dad lived instead of how he died.

Over the next few years, I became overcommitted to my work, political participation, and nonprofit volunteerism, at one point serving on five boards simultaneously. Adding a new professional development fellowship every year was an additional time suck, so progress on the book was essentially halted because of my inability to say “no” to local community leaders. At some point, you have to average more than 4.5 hours of sleep per night. Once the clothing store became operational in 2015, I stepped away from all my extracurricular activities, yet I was working more than ever before.

Another book entered my life just weeks before Hillbilly Elegy, and it compelled me to look inward and to my past. When Your Best Isn't Good Enough: Breaking Free from Perfectionism helped me understand some of the hardwiring Mom conditioned into me at an early age. That defeated perfectionism was putting me on the exact same path of unhappiness as her, and I didn’t even know it.

As a math guy, the solutions are always logical and binary. Writing, on the other hand, is much more like sculpting clay, and one has to know when to put the carving tools down. Perfectionism has often held me back from moving forward with the book, given its finality. There’s no going back after it’s in print. It’s on the internet FOREVER. Even today, posts like this receive multiple passes from me after being reviewed by my copy editor. (God Bless her!)

Part 2 begins as I promised myself I’d finish the book after moving to DC.

TLDR: After 8 years in Washington, it still didn’t happen…

If you enjoy this piece, you’ll want to check out his new book, Hard Lessons From The Hurt Business: Boxing And The Art of Life, which was just released today. In it, Ed tells the whole story of growing up in the projects with a single mom, failing out of high school, battling alcoholism, and ultimately turning his life around through boxing, sobriety, and earning a degree in physics.

I was born and raised in the projects. On top of that, this was during the 80s and 90s, when the crack epidemic was in full swing—and from my violent, poverty-stricken patch of the inner city, I had a front-row seat to violence and addiction.

When I was around 4 years old, my babysitter left out what I thought was a toy water gun, and I decided to have some fun and spray it around a bit.

Well, it turns out that the “water gun” was a syringe, and the “water” it was filled with was heroin. Now this crackhead—and I know heroin and crack aren’t the same things, but I’d been around her and her junkie posse while they were smoking what I would later learn was crack, so they’re all crackheads in my memory— didn’t kick my ass the way you might expect for wasting her high and the money spent on it like you woulda thought but my mom got into a crazy argument about it when she came to pick me up.

Now, my mom knew she shot up heroin, but using her for a babysitter was the best option she had at the time. My other relatives were messed up with their own legal and social problems, and they didn’t live near us anyway.

My biological father had deserted us to go live in Philadelphia, and her old boyfriend used to beat on me and my baby sister so severely with shit like metal coat hangers that, a lot of times, we were left with open cuts.

You know the beatings are bad when other hood moms—who also beat the hell out of their kids—are telling their gang member sons and nephews to deal with the coward on sight. It was a rough spot, and the little welfare benefits the state provides don’t last forever, so my mom had to find temporary work. We weren’t school-age yet, so it was either this or eviction. And if you get evicted from the projects, you don’t have any place to go except family—and like I said, half of them were in jail, and the other half were just as bad or worse.

Years later, when I asked my mom about this story—just to be sure I wasn’t imagining it—she told me about the fight. My mom wanted to know why there was a loaded spike out where a 4-year-old could get it, and the junkie just wanted to be reimbursed. The wild part is that my mom kept letting her babysit me. Because again, what are you gonna do?

Crackheads want people to accept them as crackheads

One thing I’ve always admired about hard drug users is their unapologetic attitude toward their addiction. And when you think about it, this attitude makes sense.

If you’re into something as wild as shooting up or smoking rocks, you’re way past the point of caring what other people think. At the very least, you care more about getting that fix than you do about anything else, including (and likely, especially) other people’s opinions, even if you’re watching their kids.

You know you’re a piece of shit. Everyone else also knows you’re a piece of shit, so why pretend? It’s your reality now, so not only do you embrace it, but you try to share it to normalize it.

The hardest drug I’ve ever done was smoking some hash off a grimy countertop through a straw sticking out of a glass bowl. I did it for the dumbest reason of all—a girl I was hooking up with and her friends were smoking it, and I wanted to fit in.

Oh, and I did shrooms once, too, with this same girl, but I don’t really count that because we all ate the shrooms in peanut butter sandwiches, and one of the girl’s hippie roommates substituted the white bread for some type of walnut vegan mess and it almost killed me because I’m highly allergic to treat nuts.

Funnily enough, being high as a kite on a psychedelic probably saved my life because it kept my airways from constricting. I wasn’t gonna take my no-insurance-having ass to the hospital because I was poor and didn’t have insurance. I also didn’t have an EpiPen either.

Interesting side note: While writing this essay, I finally researched this to see if I just got lucky or if there was something to the connection between psilocybin (the official name for “shrooms”) and allergic responses like the one I experienced.

It turns out that shrooms have a well-researched and documented effect on the inflammatory proteins released during an allergic reaction. I am not a doctor, and this is not medical advice, so don’t go blaming a random writer on the internet if you’re going through anaphylaxis and instead of taking your ass to the hospital, you decide to take a trip.

So, I’ve done some “semi-hard” drugs, but never the hard stuff, but I have been offered them on numerous occasions. For future reference of this essay, hard drugs are anything you have to cook, cut, stretch, or compress to consume. Every time I’ve been offered, it’s been while the person is about to use—or is in the middle of using—right in front of me.

I used to think it was just them being polite, but it was most likely that normalization thing I discussed earlier. I used to do the same thing in my alcoholic days when I was drinking a fifth of Mad Dog AND Thunderbird a day.

Don’t hate on the “bumwines.” My tastes reflected my budget.

I drank everywhere, around anyone, and at any function because I needed to feel like my constant state of inebriation was accepted and, therefore, normal. That meant everyone had to know about it so they could “accept it” because, after all, alcohol is the only drug that people think you have a problem with if you *don’t* do it, so in this weird, messed-up way, I was trying to normalize everyone around me.

I just took it way too far, which is why I’ve been sober since December 23rd, 2013.

The Crackhead Hustle is legendary

Now, remember, my dad wasn’t around much, but one of the few times I spent time with him, I remember he used to put “The Club” on his car. Many younger readers may not remember this, but it’s essentially an oversized bike lock that you attach to the steering wheel. Sales of these things are still strong, but I never see them, likely due to the proliferation of RF keys.

When I was 5, I asked him why he did this, and he told me so it was so some crackhead didn’t steal his car and sell it for five dollars. Now 5 5-year-old me had already seen the neighbors smoking crack, so I kinda understood what a crackhead could do, but I didn’t really understand what these creatures were capable of. I just thought it was funny as hell that someone would sell a car for five dollars.

There’s this concept called “crack prices,” where something is priced absurdly low to expedite the sale of it. Crackheads aren’t exactly known for their ability to plan for the future—as evidenced by them hitting the pipe in the first place—nor are they known for their impulse control.

So, rather than try to get the best price available for the wares by negotiating, you end up with fiends who will sell you a PlayStation, a pack of ground beef, and a microwave—all stolen, some of them from the person they are trying to sell it to—for $20. And if you didn’t have the $20 in cash, they’d accept whatever you had or the $40 equivalent in food stamps.

Food stamps are another nostalgic throwback to the 80s and 90s, so older readers, bear with me as I explain this to everyone else born after 9/11. If that’s you, you’ve probably never seen an actual food stamp outside of a museum of the ghetto history, but the hood used to have its own currency, worth 50 cents of one US dollar. Today, you just have EBT cards. It’s been a LONG time since I’ve been in the hood, but I’ve heard that crackheads have learned the technology and adapted.

When you combine the short-lived high of crack, its highly addictive nature, and the inability to run a profitable side hustle, you end up with the legendary crackhead hustle.

I was 11 the first time I became aware of the crackhead hustle. One morning, my mom was on her way to work, and I was on my way to the school bus stop when we saw this junkie coming straight towards us. I was freaking out, but my mom, a grizzled veteran of many crackhead encounters, remained steadfast on her path to work. The fiend just dashed right past us like he didn’t even see us, and my mom blurted out, “I been watchin’ that same crackhead for 4 days and nights running around here trying to score.”

This always stuck with me because I couldn’t imagine staying up for 3 days straight for anything. Even when I tried to stay up late playing video games, the longest I could make it was 2 a.m. Maybe 3 a.m. if I was really in the zone and didn’t have school the next day. However, by that point in my life, I had enough experience with crackheads to know that this was most likely not an exaggeration.

Another side note. That popular meme “you ever see a crackhead say they don’t have any money to get high? Don’t get outworked by a crackhead” meme? I created that, and I’ve got the receipts to prove it. But I was just a small Twitter account when I said that, so someone just took it and ran with it. I challenge anyone to find a posting of it earlier than this.

This hustle is incredible and has led to some crazy stuff. One of my favorite news stories is of some fiends who stole a whole damn bridge and tried to sell it to the metal man. You can read that story here.

When I was 21, a crackhead broke into my apartment and stole a jar of change, but ignored the PlayStation 2 because he needed to get his fix. These are the same characters who will break into your car to steal the change on your seat, overlooking everything else, because that fix has to be satisfied. But hey, at least they’re polite.

When I was 12, while letting myself into the house with a calzone I picked up, a crackhead materialized out of thin air, robbed me for my food and the change in my pocket, and before he scurried off back into the darkness, said “Good look cuh.”

If you don’t speak hood, that roughly translates into “Thank you kindly, good sir.” And they probably need those manners because they deal with some of the most violent people you’ll ever meet: drug dealers.

Drug dealers are some of the worst people you’ll ever meet

I’m not talking about the dudes who used to sell “dimes and nics,” or, despite the proliferation of dispensaries and the gradual legalization of marijuana, they still do. I’m talking about the guys who sell the hard stuff.

When I moved from the Terrance Village Projects to the Northview Heights Projects (shoutout to my 412 people reading this and know the exact hellholes I’m talking about), I ended up living next to a crack dealer.

Selling drugs isn’t like most businesses, and when you live next to someone involved in that line of work, you become painfully aware of that fact. There’s a good reason why the late rapper Notorious B.I.G. warned in the song “The 10 Crack Commandments” to “never sell no crack where you rest at.”

First, there were the hours. Crackheads seem to function on a circadian rhythm that’s the opposite of most people. Given the low police presence in the projects, it’s not like crackheads have some practical reason for only buying drugs after the sun goes down.

Project houses are row houses, so we shared a wall. Because of that, I could hear anytime they had a visitor who knocked on the door. Most nights, from dusk until dawn, the house next to me was a crack convenience store.

The thing that’s most strongly etched in my memory about living next to this drug dealer wasn’t the frequent door knocks throughout the night or the occasional break-ins. It was the violence—and not the violence against other drug users or drug dealers, but the violence against his girlfriend.

I’ve witnessed a lot of violence in my life, but there is something uniquely disturbing about only hearing it, especially when it’s such a one-sided beatdown. I can still hear the pain and fear in the woman’s screams just as easily as I can hear the smacks and thuds of her against the wall. I’m sitting here thinking maybe we should call the police, and my mom told me she’d kick my ass worse than that if we did. I didn’t get it then, but she was just trying to keep us safe from retaliation.

The type of person willing to beat a woman like this has no qualms about attacking someone else’s children. My sister once played a prank that resulted in this guy being hit with an egg. In response, he chased her to our back door and tried to push his way in to get to her. I pushed him back so hard that he fell over. For the rest of that summer, I lived in fear that he was going to shoot me.

I’ve met dealers of all different substances. My general experience has been that the harder the drug, the worse the human being who deals it. This is likely a result of the ruthlessness you need to get into and survive the game.

Harder drugs are worth more money, so the competition is tougher, and that requires a more dangerous person to succeed. It’s not like you beat the competition by running a better ad campaign and a bigger marketing budget. On the street, the rules of the jungle apply. It’s survival of the one with the most firepower and the least fear of going to prison.

Legalizing drugs might solve a lot of problems

Speaking of prison, this is the major reason I’m for legalizing all drugs. Yes, some people will use them who otherwise wouldn’t, but legalization means they would no longer have to go to a part of town where wearing the wrong colors could get you shot to score.

And yes, that would probably result in a few more addicts. But right now, if you want to sniff, snort, or smoke something that requires a bic pen and some chore boy, you’re gonna do it anyway, regardless of the laws on the books.

At least this way, there will be regulations to make sure you don’t get some stuff hot with fentanyl. But more importantly, all the violence associated with the dope game—intended and collateral— will come to a screeching halt.

Drug users themselves are relatively harmless. While someone going through withdrawal is certainly more likely to rob you, drug users are generally not violent criminals.

A U.S. Department of Justice report titled “Drug Use, Dependence, and Abuse Among State Prisoners and Jail Inmates, 2007-2009” reports that only 14% of those incarcerated for violent crime committed the offense for money to buy drugs. 14% isn’t 0, but you get the idea.

Crackheads are more likely to break into your house and scurry off if you shine a light on them than mug you in the street and shoot you. The same report by the U.S. Department of Justice revealed that 39% of people jailed for crimes of property theft committed them to get money for drugs.

Most of the violence that comes out of the drug game is the result of rivalries between different dealers at all levels.

Drive-by shootings and shootouts on the retail street level often occur between rivals trying to control territory or eliminate witnesses. And while addicts sometimes lose their lives over drug debts, don’t believe everything you see in the movies.

Killing your customers is bad for business because:

1. It draws the attention of the police, who are explicitly tasked with making your job as hard as possible

2. You’ve killed a customer. Any half-decent drug dealer never sells drugs on credit anyway, so this is kind of a moot point

At the wholesale level, it’s the same game but on a bigger stage. The cartel violence in Mexico has been going on for almost 40 years, has ripped apart Mexico, and is bleeding into the United States. That violence is between the cartels fighting for control of the market and has led to rampant corruption and the deaths of thousands of people NOT in the cartel.

Imagine what legalizing drugs would do. Making it a legal commodity would simultaneously raise tax revenue and dramatically reduce the violence since these things would become not-so-respectable businesses, but businesses nonetheless. If you doubt that, ask yourself how often you’ve seen a place selling liquor or cigarettes get shot up. Those places sell an addictive, destructive poison, but it’s all legal, so they compete legally.

My argument isn’t perfect, and I’ve changed my mind on this a few times over the years, but I think that’s the only way the war on drugs ever ends. As far as I’m concerned, drugs have won that war, and we need to be negotiating terms of peace and reparations.

But let’s be honest. The government doesn’t really want the war on drugs to end. Not only is it profitable for them, but you might find out that some of the people you trust most have been junkies the whole time.

Hard drug users are never who you expect

Not every addict looks like what you expect an addict to look like. Many are doctors, lawyers, politicians, and members of law enforcement. I have a friend who was a pretty big player in the dope game in my city for a while, and he told me that many of his customers were people on the nicer side of town who’d connected with him through various ways, one of which was getting arrested.

A 2016 survey of 12,825 lawyers found that 7.4% of them had used opioids or cocaine in the last 12 months. 5.5% of doctors used the hard stuff in the past year. Anywhere from 20-30%of first responders (police, firemen, EMTs) have struggled with addiction.

I don’t care about most people getting high, but there are some professionals where it’s not a good idea for you to be doing lines, on or off duty. As for everyone else, as long as you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you.

If you want to check out more of Ed’s writing, I strongly recommend you grab his book Hard Lessons From The Hurt Business: Boxing And The Art of Life. It’s available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever books are sold.

In the summer of 2008, I moved to Chicago, but quit my job working for a market maker at the Chicago Board of Options Exchange (CBOE) just before relocating. Luckily, my former employer, Mr. Hooks, was willing to take me back at his engineering firm in Gary, Indiana.

That forced me into a long daily reverse commute, which included a walk to the Red Line ride to the Loop, then another walk to the South Shore, where I would traverse back to The Region. I met a lot of people on the train that year, but Sammy taught me something new: finance is learned from the streets, not in the classroom.

Before there were smartphones to entertain, sitting on a quiet train for an hour next to a stranger felt weird to me unless I had headphones or a book. Internet for laptops? Not a chance.

I could only stare off into space for so long before nervously striking up conversations with my seat mate to pass the time. I wasn’t desperate for a job, but not using my college education was eating away at me, and the Great Recession wasn't paying any favors to those with degrees in finance. With that, I tried to network with anyone that looked important. Us blue-collar kids are taught implicitly to believe that anyone wearing dress clothes or a tie must be successful. Little did I know, in the acquisition of business cards, I was practicing elements from the book "How to Talk to Anyone,", read many years later.

Every day, Mr. Hooks dropped me off at the Gary Metro Center, which was on his way home from the office, a practice we did for the duration of my time in Chicago. On this particular evening, the train was late and people were not having it. One guy looked particularly annoyed. He was my height but arguably the most jacked AND ripped person I’d ever seen. I wanted to ask him about his fitness and diet plan, but instead, chickened out and just started small talk by asking him when the train would arrive… like he would know. Again, there was no technology at the time to tell us otherwise. He asked me about how to find work, and I told him the mill was the place to be. It was great work…if you could get it.

That often required an “in” such as a family member or friend. For whatever reason, we exchanged numbers and I told him we could continue to chat about it on the train. He introduced himself as Vic Young. (I used Sammy in the title of this post for alliteration.)

After sitting down, he immediately asked me what I did for employment. I replied that I worked at an engineering firm. By his facial expression, it was clear he had no idea what that meant. When I returned the question, he said, “I work out.” I probed deeper because I assumed he worked at a gym. Vic quickly went into his personal story. He said nonchalantly that he had just been released from jail and was living in some transitional housing in Chicago before moving back to stay with his mother in Gary. Vic said he was in prison since age 20 and had been “working out” for 11 years now. I finally circled back to my original motive and asked about his diet, which consisted of mostly oatmeal every day. I couldn’t believe it.

Vic went to Roosevelt High School, which was dedicated in 1931 and built exclusively for black students in order to maintain racial segregation in Gary after the Emerson School Strike. He never finished at ‘The Velt’ and dropped out to run a small drug operation where he most sold crack. That is until he was caught by the FBI. I made a note to him that those cases are built slowly but tended to have ironclad cases on the back end, resulting in severe sentences. He already knew that, though, because before landing in the state pen, he’d been caught by the Gary Police a few times. Vic said he often carried about $5,000 cash, but when he was turned in, law enforcement would only report that he had $1,000 on hand. He knew they kept the rest but believed that was business as usual. Intermittently while telling his story, Vic would comment multiple times on the attractiveness of the ladies sitting around us. My reviews were mixed, but I quickly realized it might have been a while since he actually saw a woman.

Vic told me he never joined a gang and ran a relatively small operation that consisted of foot soldiers and one financier. His paper came from a family member whom he refused to narc on after being caught by the Feds, like leading to a longer sentence. Because he was “small time,” Vic said he never had to worry about drive-by shootings. Apparently, for him, small time was regularly turning $ 20,000 into $ 80,000 with what he called little effort.

I asked how a community so impoverished could afford drugs. Vic told me “street money” was different from “regular money.” He said women in their late 20s had a lot of cash for drugs, especially the prostitutes on Broadway. He went through the various inputs and outputs of the business to the point I was convinced that he knew what a balance sheet and income statement were from my finance classes. I threw out some terms like price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio, debt-to-equity ratio, liquidity ratio, inventory turnover ratio, and operating margin. Vic never heard of such jargon but as he continued to talk, it became clear that he was using these terms in real time to make informed business decisions.

Given how complex our financial system had become, I told him drug dealing was probably “more pure” from an economics standpoint than many legitimate businesses. There are no direct government subsidies on the production side, sales are tax-free, income is tax-free, free markets and open competition reign, no regulatory compliance costs (although paying off cops could fall into that bucket), and no lobbying the government for regulatory capture.

Risk is inherent in all businesses, and Vic knew there were two big ones in his line of work that couldn’t be measured with a calculator much less a degree: prison and death. Given the high unemployment and lack of legitimate opportunities in the area, he understood that many aspiring foot soldiers would take on that risk for virtually any wage. Being street smart, Vic positioned himself in management between the people on the streets and those who financed the operations.

With my nerdiness, you could tell he was starting to drift from the conversation, and at some point, he just got up and said he was going to “throw some game” at a girl down the aisle. He ended up talking to her for about 10 minutes before I overheard her say, “I’m in a relationship,” to which he quickly returned to our seat unphased.

I jokingly told him that he should write a book about street finance as a way to teach young people entrepreneurship, and it could be leveraged into real, meaningful work. He had no interest but said, “Mane, you are pretty smart. You must read a lot.” I agreed, but said it was because I was also looking for a job online and often got distracted by various Wikipedia rabbit holes.

Living in Chicago, I became enamored by the city’s history leading me into all things Al Capone including the wars between the Chicago Outfit and Northside Gang. While traveling through the evolution of organized crime, I’d become astute as to how black drug dealers were exploited by other ethnic groups but still worked their way to the top across the country.

My education included learning about high-profile kingpins such as Bumpy Johnson, who brokered deals with the mafia in Harlem in the 1930s where years later Nicky Barnes would form The Council, and Frank Lucas, ultimately changed the neighborhood by cutting out the middlemen via direct shipments from Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia. Stanley “Tookie” Williams started the Crips in LA, but it was “Freeway” Ricky Ross who undercut the competition in price by buying in bulk leading to thousands of employees in over 40 cities. Lastly, bringing it back to Chicago, Jeff Fort founded the Black P. Stones, which later became El Rukn, and leveraged its religious affiliation to evade law enforcement surveillance.

Vic was shocked that a white boy knew so much about what he called black history. I was even more shocked that a guy who had never used the internet and spent the past decade in prison knew so much about people who weren't exactly found in our history books. For a moment, I began to ponder where he learned this information, but then Vic jumped into politics.

“Is Obama going to win?” he asked. “Yeah, he will,” I said. “Are you kidding me?” he responded with both a look of confusion and excitement.

“You should be much more concerned about local politics because that’s where things actually happen.” I said.

Back to my nerd ways, I spoke about my concerns regarding the City of Gary, specifically my confusion about where the millions in casino revenues went while knowing that local law enforcement was among the lowest-paid in the nation, despite being subjected to far more danger than most in the profession. It didn’t make sense to me that the mayor made more than the governor of the state (at that time). Either way, I told him that Gary was the victim of a perfect storm and, in time, the city would repair itself. He couldn't see the possibilities. Many still don’t.

As we rolled into Millennium Station, I emphasized the importance of finishing his GED at Malcolm X College. From there, I gave unsolicited advice to leverage every contact he could to try to get a job in the mill since I knew they were the best-paying on earth for someone without a college degree. However, I also tried to temper his expectations, given the past. Just a few years earlier, several mills went bankrupt, including LTV Steel and Bethleham Steel in Northwest Indiana. There was no telling what this recession might bring.

Their assets were bought for pennies on the dollar while workers’ pensions were slashed, some in half. Mr. Hooks never told me, but I know, based on conversations in the industry, he kept me on staff despite the mills running far behind on their payments to contractors that year. If there’s anything I learned from him, it’s that frugal entrepreneurs who live well below their means can weather any economic storm.

Not everyone receives fair treatment, though. That same month in September, the federal government bailed out AIG, and took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but allowed Washington Mutual and Lehman Brothers to file for bankruptcy. Having graduated less than a year earlier, this government intervention was an affront to everything I learned in college. Many banks were deemed too big to fail and deserved a bail out from the Troubled Asset Relief Program but even though the program “made money” for the government, it allowed for more industry consolidation, ironically, making the system more fragile and inviting moral hazard. The system now rewarded failure, as millions in bonuses were still paid out. I was proud to see some locally own banks like Centier, founded in 1896, stick to their principles. Steel mills as critical national security assets just aren’t as important but I guess loans to General Motors were the best consolation prize for the Rust Belt.

I was never destined to work in government or politics, but it was the defining moment that led me to grad school a few months later. Here, I could carve a different path and inject my working class blue-collar views into the conversation.

Vic and I parted ways in downtown Chicago, and I never saw him again. While writing this post, I pulled up his cell number but learned through a voicemail that it had long been reassigned to a gal named Kim.

After returning to my pad in Lincoln Park, I sat down to reflect on what had just happened and had a flashback to one of the many life lessons from my late dad.

He said, “Son, those As and Bs in high school will be Bs and Cs at best in college. You need to understand the importance of seat time.” To him, that meant real world experience and learning on the job. He echoed the last part many times over the years. I scoffed at his comments knowing that we both had the same teachers in high school, yet he was a D student on a good day. Ironically, he demanded excellence from me in the classroom. Dad couldn’t pass algebra or geometry, but he practiced the same math regularly with all the “projects” we had at home.

Whether it was plumbing, woodworking, roofing, building some widget or maintaining lawn mowers/cars, he solved complex problems effortlessly. He rarely gave me the answers to anything, and one of his most frequently used phrases was, “Son, figure it out.” Dad had practical and useful intelligence, but I’d been conned by higher education to believe that he wasn’t smart because he wasn’t “credentialed.” The reality is he had more brainpower upstairs than most PhDs I’ve met in life.

Like Dad, Vic was an autodidact. While the family taught them both basic skills, most of their advanced knowledge would come the old-fashioned way. Dad had an expression for this and used to say, “Son, you learn by doing.” The Egyptians built the pyramids without the math shortcuts of a slide rule or the Ti-89 I used in high school, but they figured it out through the tribulations of trial and error, the mother of all teachers. The Ancient Greeks were academics, but the Romans were practitioners. Whether one comes from the streets, steel country, or a farm, there is something to be said about respecting people in this country regularly deems as “uneducated.” I might have a fancy degree in money, but Vic “turned shit into sugar”, given the only options before him. The school of hard knocks is real, but in the end, we are better for it. Thanks for the lesson, Vic. Class is dismissed.

This post is an opportunity to reshare that speech, highlight one of America's most unique, hard scrabble school systems, and honor the place that gave me the tools needed to put my life on a different trajectory, especially after being awarded the Lilly Endowment Community Scholarship.

While my speech only took five minutes to read, it took 16 hours to pencil out over a weekend as I was cooped up in my row house on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., that June. Given the situation, the goal was to provide timeless wisdom while also trying to say something timely.

I’ve long followed the progress of the River Forest Community School Corporation (RFCSC) since graduating from college. Picking at the data on the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) website, a pattern emerged that didn’t make sense: the kids were an outlier compared to other schools around the state, regularly outperforming their poverty regarding test scores vs. free/reduced lunches. Before charter schools came online and school choice vouchers became available, RF was the fourth poorest in the state, behind East Chicago, Gary, Hammond, and the Indianapolis Public School (IPS) system. Something wasn’t adding up.

Because RF sits between the cities of Gary, Hobart, Lake Station, and the town of New Chicago, there is no center or downtown. In turn, the school has always served as the community's anchor. I politely call River Forest the “hillbilly overflow” school as it was thrown up in a rush in the late 1950s. The neighboring schools of Lake Station and Hobart were new but already busting at the seams from southern whites (most not from Appalachia) and some Mexican migration driven by jobs in the steel industry. Those transplants melted with the kids of first-wave immigrants of Polish, Slovak, and Croatian descent. That ethnic background is represented by the school’s mascot, Joe Magarac, a Croatian immigrant steelworker of folklore. The school was named River Forest for obvious reasons and called Ingots in honor of steelmaking, which peaked nationally in that era. Ingot casting is no longer done at fully integrated mills given a more efficient process called continuous casting.

I can’t count the number of teachers, past and present, who have told me how special and amazing their experience serving the kids at RF, especially compared to their time at the area's larger and more affluent schools.

RF has teachers who have dedicated 35-40-year careers to the district. Even during a teaching shortage, RFCSC continues to recruit and retain highly qualified and passionate teachers who remain in the corporation at a higher retention rate than other, even higher-performing districts.

Principal Gaelyn Mlynarcik represented River Forest at the Indiana Association of School Principals State Banquet, where she was recognized as the District 1 Principal of the Year in 2024.

Over the years, however, RF was dying slowly as people like me were told that success meant moving up and out, ideally with a college degree. My departure was one of many that led Lake Station to become the city with the most significant percentage decline in the 2010 census, second only to Gary in Northwest Indiana. My graduating class in 2003 was 75 kids, and my sister’s class just four years later barely broke 55.

With no major business assets in the district, RF had the lowest assessed value per student in Northwest Indiana, which made funding the school through property taxes no easy task. Given their commitment to the community, voters in the RF district were among the first in the state to successfully pass two school funding referendums that raised property taxes in 2015 and 2019. I was quoted in the Post-Trib on the importance of the first and was inspired to write an op-ed after the second.

Fifteen years ago, the charters pulled kids (mostly basketball players) away from public schools like RF. Over time, however, RF and the neighboring public school, Whiting, turned that narrative on its head. While some fell into a tailspin, RF moved in the opposite direction.

Today, nearly 500 kids use the school choice program and transfer into River Forest from other districts (in this order): Gary, Lake Station, Merrillville, Portage, and Hobart. The school also retains 90%+ of its own kids, ranking it 30th out of 290 districts statewide. This shift changed the school from 60/40 white ethnic majority when I graduated to now 70/30 minority-majority.

New challenges emerge when children don’t reside in the community in which they attend school, but the administration is committed to molding all children in the Ingot image.

The school superintendent, Kevin Trezak, a “lifer” from the district, says RF provides a “small school atmosphere with big school opportunities.” I could not agree more.

A few highlights from his previous letters:

• a multi-award-winning band program has earned gold several years in a row at State-level competitions

• a choral program that has seen similar success, with all individual participants receiving gold this past year (2018)

• Academic teams that continue to be top-ten finishers at the state level.

• Spell Bowl Teams that continue to be top-ten finishers at the state level

Most importantly, RF has been represented county-wide nearly 50% of the time since 2000 when it comes to a student (myself included) being awarded the Lilly Endowment Community Scholarship administered by the Legacy Foundation, a four-year full-tuition ride to any college or university in Indiana.

One Legacy staffer cited a recent RF recipient, “During the interview process, he spoke highly of the high school administration and staff, which is something that not every candidate does.”

Saying please and thank you is free. Holding doors open for others is free. Showing up on time is free. Putting in the hard work needed to succeed is free. Two books remind me of some of the culture embedded in this school system: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success and Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

In November 2016, just a month before I moved to Washington, DC, I spoke to the first graders at Evans Elementary. They taught me so many things in that hour, but it was clear: those kids are in no better socioeconomic position than my cohort was 30+ years ago.

In May 2024, I decided to visit and give a talk to the seniors as a follow-up to my commencement address.

I assured them that while graduation was around the corner, there shouldn’t be any pressure to follow some pre-ordained “success model” sold to my generation; however, they needed to consider their future.

In my Elder Millennial rant, I encouraged the kids to spend time away from their phones and instead with real people because I believe the 2010s “Tech-Triad” of high-speed internet + smartphones + social media serves as a primary source of our mental health issues.

I plan to continue advocating for River Forest as a model school for working-class folks. Their unique mix of students, teachers, and administration is committed to maintaining community and building better outcomes regardless of circumstances. Where you come from doesn’t matter; it’s all about where you’re going.

Commencement Address - July 9, 2020

Greetings and congratulations, Class of 2020. Here we are, you made it! Graduating high school is a major accomplishment and one of the first of many milestones in your life.

I must, however, also offer my condolences. For the rest of your years, wherever you may go, you will have to explain to people what an Ingot is…. and hopefully, they won’t ask what the school colors are. They say it's red and gold, but is it Vegas gold, orange gold or mustard yellow? I guess it depends on which sport and what year we’re talking about.

Thank you to administrators, faculty, staff, as well as parents, family and friends, for allowing me the honor and privilege to speak to you.

When I originally wrote this speech last fall, we were living in a different world, one with an economy flying high and opportunities abound. While Class of 2020 slogans included “Perfect Vision” and “The future is clear,”, I think a more appropriate one now is “Hindsight is 20/20.” Because as time goes on, you will look back at this year, and know, that despite the adversity that was endured from this pandemic, you came out as a stronger person, class, and community.

It is the sacrifices and support over the years, by the families here today, that helped you reach this point of accomplishment. It is the faculty and staff that put in more than just a 40-hour work week, as they also served as coaches, mentors, and sometimes, just a person that was there to listen. Some staff have actually been here since the time of Abraham Lincoln. I’m looking at you Burton, Cullison, Thompson, Weitzel. But seeing as how they still have some hair on their heads, it looks like the jokes on me. In all seriousness, your investment in these young leaders cannot go without appreciation. Please give yourself a round of applause.

Many years ago, when I first started my career, a family member of modest means from rural-Kentucky, left me with two points of timeless wisdom that I would like to share with you. He said, “Robert, never be ashamed of what you do for a living, and never forget where you came from.”

Number 1. Never be ashamed of what you do for a living. The education you received here at River Forest should lead to a life of service, action, and leadership. My generation was told that college was the only path to success, but there are many ways to pursue your passion. At the end of the day, there is dignity in all work, whether you’re white-collar or blue-collar or somewhere in-between. It takes all kinds of kinds to make the world go round. One of my mentors said there are five pillars to a strong community: That is, education, business and labor, non-profits, government, and faith-based organizations. While your job will fall into one of these buckets, I encourage you to participate in another. Whether it's running for public office or volunteering at a local soup kitchen, serving others is a very rewarding experience and a great way to make your community a better place to work, live and play.

Number 2: Never forget where you came from. That’s why I’ve returned from Washington DC, for such a great event. When you leave River Forest this evening, always be proud to be an Ingot. As a bedroom community to US Steel in Gary, this place was never home to silver spoons, much less trust-fund kids. You might have started on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, but being from the working class is a real badge of honor. Despite minimum resources, I can see from test scores, sports teams, and other accolades reported in the media that you’ve outperformed all expectations set by the experts. As the story of David and Goliath reminds us, some disadvantages may actually indeed, be advantages.

Speaking of advantages, when did River Forest get air conditioning? Hard to believe the school didn’t even have AC when I graduated. But really, the advantage River Forest has, is the diversity of its student body, which is now minority-majority. That strength is something few schools in the Region, much less state, have accomplished. While others talk about integration and inclusion, you actually live it. As our historical challenge with race relations moves to the forefront once again, you are uniquely positioned to advocate for the values of liberty, freedom and justice as espoused by our Constitution. I challenge you to take action in a positive and thoughtful way, to help build a more perfect union.

To do this, it starts right here, by being present… and off your phone. Social media profits through the addiction to manufactured outrage. And while it’s a great source of entertainment at times, very few of society’s problems will be figured out on the internet. Finding solutions requires us to live outside our comfort zones by engaging others in an authentic way, which takes time and can only happen in person.

Now that I sound like an old timer ranting about the ills of technology and the internet, let’s finish this on a high note, which means for some of you, you can wake up now. I wish the Class of 2020 all the best in your endeavors. Maintain humility in your successes, learn from your failures, and always pay it forward. Thank you.

From a personal and professional standpoint, it makes sense to be organized, effective, and efficient with our data to achieve our goals.

That’s why I want you to start building your Client Relationship Manager (CRM) today.

From Rolodexes to Smartphones: A Brief Evolution

Before CRM software came out, people organized their contacts with a Rolodex. However, it could have been more portable. If you were in direct sales, you had no choice but to lug those cards around so you could “dial for dollars.” Those of us who grew up in the 1990s were the last kids who had to memorize our friends’ landline phone numbers.

I still have many of those numbers stuck in my head despite not using them in over 20 years, along with cheat codes for Nintendo and Sega Genesis. Lucky for you, these supercomputers in our hands make life so much easier. Our ability to store more than just someone’s name, number, and address in a file has become exponential.

Politics Paved the Way for Personal Data Use

While everyone is currently looking at big tech when it comes to aggregating personal information, political campaigns were ahead of the curve regarding the commercialization and effective marketing use of personal data.

Even through the 2000s, campaigns ‘tagged’ people based on demographics such as age, gender, race, and, obviously, previous voting history. In the data science age, marketers pivoted to psychographics, which digs far deeper into people’s behaviors, from hobbies, favorite foods, and lifestyle behaviors.

Okay, so you’re not a political campaign hack or corporate marketer, so why do you care about CRMs? At the end of the day, we are all in the sales business.

We’re All in Sales: Why CRMs Matter to Everyone

Whether it’s pushing a product, a policy,; regardless or yourself in the dating sphere, achieving your goals is at stake here.

Washington, DC is a networking city, and regardless of how smart someone is, things get done because of relationships. You never know when you might need someone.

The city can sometimes be extremely transactional, so what are you doing to build authentic, real relationships? Is it quality or quantity…or can you have both? When meeting someone at an event, there should be more to it than just swapping business cards.

A good conversationalist will ask questions beyond “What do you do?” and pivot to “Why do you do it?” That will take the discussion in a personal direction, and you will learn something unique about that person. Whether it’s learning about their favorite hobby, their kids’ recent sports victory, or an article they published, you should jot that down as soon as possible on the back of the business card…after you leave the chat, of course!

Regurgitating personal information back to your contacts at some point in the future provides value. First, it shows that you were listening to what they said, and second, it was about something important to them.

This matters because when you reach back out to them with something you need, they won’t perceive the request as entirely selfish, so hit the delete button on that text or email. I’ve helped many folks get jobs on Capitol Hill over the past few years and truly believe in paying it forward. I wouldn’t be successful if I didn’t build a network of people to put balls into motion.

Networking With Purpose

As a firm believer of ‘skin in the game,’ I don’t give advice. I share what I do. Suppose I perceive someone to be a high-value contact instead of offering up my business card. In that case, I prefer to ask permission to ‘push’ my vCard (VCF) to that person’s cell phone – probably the second most sacred number to an individual next to their social security number. Also, asking for business cards is always better than handing out yours.

Next, you must get this information in some software within 24 hours because you will likely forget the conversation, much less where you met them. I can’t tell you how many times people have come up to me in the hall, and I can’t place them because I forgot the details of our initial conversation. If needed, send that person an email the next day to lock that information down.

There are a lot of CRM tools out there, so it’s probably best to know what information you’d like to use before signing up for a monthly subscription. First, I would start with family. Being able to send out Birthday and Christmas cards efficiently is always a win. I started collecting business cards on the South Shore train while I was in college and desperately looking for a job during the Great Recession.

The downside of that era was that contacts only synced one way from Microsoft Outlook, and I can’t tell you how many times I went crazy after my laptop overwrote contacts on my HTC smartphone or vice versa. Today, that stress is long gone.

Early Lessons From Campaign Work and Coalition Building

My first real attempt at contact management was while running a state representative race in 2010. The candidate was well-established in the community and had a lot of contacts. Instead of sending out generic blasts to the entire list, I learned how to segregate them based on how they wanted to interact with the campaign. Some were interested in volunteering, usually split between phone banking and knocking on doors.

Other people just wanted to put out yard signs and were willing to drive wherever to make it happen. Then there’s the fundraising side of the operation. Some folks will write a check based on a direct mail request; others are looking for an event with a value proposition that includes food or some keynote speaker.

Lastly, some major donors need individual outreach for a direct ask over the phone or during in-person meetings, but being organized with contacts helped me build coalitions between groups of people that normally would never intersect. These coalitions were often cross-cutting between government and business or business and non-profits. Given that, I enjoyed connecting people through a common cause.

After that campaign, I volunteered to sit on local nonprofit boards, and the mayor appointed me to a few governmental boards. The fundraising continued, but being organized with contacts helped me build coalitions between groups of people that normally would never intersect.

These coalitions were often cross-cutting between government and business or perhaps business and non-profits. I enjoyed connecting people through a common cause, given that those people were unlikely to meet any other way.

Effective Tagging: The Secret to CRM Success

To be effective with your contacts, it’s all about tagging. I put down anything I can think of that might be helpful for the future: political affiliation, general location, hobbies, career, etc.

After moving to Washington, DC, my business as an independent menswear retailer morphed into an image consultant and custom clothier. Being organized and having contacts helped me build coalitions between groups of people that normally would never intersect. These coalitions were often cross-cutting between government and business or business and non-profits.

I enjoyed connecting people through a common cause, given that it helped me send marketing pieces via email to existing customers or prospects within a geographic location since I often travel to service my book of business. Also, those in direct sales need to track your activity when pushing people throughyour sales pipeline. I have used both Streak, which works through G-Mail and Pipedrive.

Writers might use something like Substack to monetize their writing; others need something more comprehensive, like HubSpot, to fire off marketing emails and automate social media posts.

Now, it’s not all about family and business. I tag some people with shared interests and hobbies, such as whiskey, cigars, cycling, powerlifting, etc. If there is an event in town I plan to attend, I’ll forward an email invite to these folks. People appreciate you looking out for them when there is something fun to do in town.

For someone in the public policy space, regardless of whether they work in local, state or federal government, it’s highly useful to tag people based on their issue sets. For example, if I wrote an article about, say, budget policy, how good for it be if I could send out an email blast to all the people that I know working in that space. It helps affirm that I am an authority in the space and if those people like it, they are likely to share and forward, further enhancing your personal brand.

Start Now and Stay Organized

A few months ago, I rode my bicycle 850 miles from DC to the Indiana Dunes and raised $128,000 for charity. It was an impressive feat, but after the event was over and I returned to the nation’s Capitol, I quickly realized how poorly my outreach was to long-time associates I knew would have liked to attend my event in person or, at minimum, donate to the cause.

Even though I spent money on social media ads and sent a few emails to over 15,000 addresses, it’s easy for things to fall in the cracks. Some people don’t use social media or check their email as much as others, so while it is time-consuming, direct outreach will always be best. The key is having the right list ready to go when you start.

Even after 15 years of trying to leverage technology to help others and myself, I am still learning. I hope you’ll start early and stay on top of maintaining your CRM because it’s a powerful tool. Regardless of your motives, keeping your digital life organized will free up your time for other pursuits.

This article was originally published by Network of enlightened Women.

Introduction

The book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded Americans is Tearing Us Apart came out as I struggled to look for work during the Great Recession in 2008. It’s due for an update given how technology has exacerbated all the book’s conclusions with the merging of what I call the ‘tech triad’ of high speed internet, smart phone and social media. In addition, various types of jobs, especially freelance consulting and other remote work has allowed us to self-sort faster than ever before. That process is what keeps us from learning from others despite being more connect to each other than ever before. Lived experience does not happen on the internet.

Most of my life has been an investigation, a desire to understand ‘why things are the way that they are’, particularly in my rust belt community on the fringe of Gary, Indiana. Dad raised me to live outside my comfort zone because there are more teaching moments that way. Some of his approach is covered by stories in The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt. I’ve taken that advice to an extreme (such as biking 825 miles over 10 days with no training) and built that into my normal. Being in a room full of people that don’t look, sound, believe or act like me is fun. I regularly argue politics and religion with many of my acquaintances but of all the unique people I’ve met in life, Robert the Drug Dealer probably had the most impact on my thinking about socioeconomics. His lived experience trumps every PhD writing on the subject.

A Vacation

My close friends from college were destined for bigger things and all of them went straight into graduate or law school while I flailed around looking for a job. A few contacted me about getting together during their fall break. I hadn’t had a vacation in as long as I could remember so I told my boss, Mr. Hooks, that I’d be taking a few days off. Between working as a contractor for the steel mills and sending resumes to Chicago all night long, I was worn out. This trip would be an excellent opportunity to recharge and figure out my next move, especially after seeing the stock market’s record drop for the year that September.

The plan was for us to visit one friend at the University of Illinois for an extended weekend. I had just moved to Lincoln Park, Chicago a few months earlier and left my two cars in a parking lot at a friend’s apartment complex back in Indiana. I told a former roommate that I would take Chicago’s CTA train down to the Hazel Crest train stop, the perfect spot to connect on his route.

I didn’t know much about Hazel Crest other than the receptionist from my internship at Merrill Lynch (in Merrillville, Spring 2007) lived there. She was the only Black employee but seemed middle class. According to sources on the internet, the city had crime but it was dwarfed by neighboring communities such as Harvey. Five years later, the website HeyJackass: Illustrating Chicago’s Values, would emerge to sarcastically cover the shootings. I wasn’t scared to land there but the X factor would be if my old roommate arrived on time. He was late for every event we ever did together other than a college basketball game. He always seemed to be 20 minutes early or more, wondering why the rest of our friend group wasn’t there yet. I had a feeling this would be a repeat but maintained my optimism.

Stranger Danger?

With my luggage in tow, I was the only person to get off the train station and it seemed pretty quiet out. A man was laid back on the bench, and he didn’t move much. He was dressed in streetwear, too nice to be homeless. About 10 minutes passed, a few more trains went through, and nobody got on or off. After making eye contact a few times, I got nervous and decided to break the ice with him. “You got one of those for me?” I said, pointing to the 40 sitting by his foot. “You wanna drink?” As he picked up the bottle, he waved it in my direction. “Nah, I was just kidding. I’m more of a whiskey guy myself.” It wasn’t a true statement then, but I had no interest in sharing a bottle with such a stranger.

He wanted to know what I was doing there, and he made sure I understood that I was the first white person he ever saw on the South Side. I didn’t exactly want to tell him that I was headed to a farm to eat steaks and shoot shotguns, so I just told him that I was waiting for a friend that would arrive anytime now and this train stop was the most convenient spot for us to meet. I didn’t want him to think I would be alone for long.

The man then proceeded to ask me if I wanted to buy a brick. “What’s that?” I said. “You know, a brick?” “No, I don’t…” I responded.” Then he started to get uneasy and stepped back. “Are you a cop? Do you have a wire?!?” I nervously laughed out loud, thinking things could go downhill fast, so I blurted out. “Do I look like a cop to you?!?” Pointing at the large logo on my green hoodie, “I don’t think an undercover cop would come to the South Side of Chicago in Abercrombie & Fitch.” Then I pulled up my sweatshirt, showing him I didn’t have a wire on.

That seemed to satisfied him. The man then pointed to a car about a block away as we looked down from the platform. “That’s where the brick is, in the trunk.” Once I returned to my senses, I understood what he was talking about: a brick of weed. “To be honest, I don’t smoke,” I said. The man crunched up his face and looked at me like I was crazy. “Don’t smoke?!? Broooo, everyone smokes!” “Yeah, I just prefer alcohol as my vice.” To which he laughed.

I inquired about how he got into the drug trade. The man dropped out of high school and joined the Black Souls gang, of which I was unfamiliar. I only knew about the Latin Kings and Gangster Disciple (GD) Folks as they started to move to the edge of my community from Gary in the mid 90s. A few friends were “beat in” when I was in 6th grade but I don’t think they were ever fully immersed in the culture much less the other activities associated with gang life. I distinctively remember giving a science project presentation and the teacher said “Be sure to tell all your folks…” and my buddy busted out laughing, causing a class disruption. When the teacher inquired about what was so funny, he couldn’t explain it to her…

Anyways, this man had a few small jobs as an unskilled laborer but was always let go when his employer couldn’t pay him, and the drug trade was WAY more lucrative. When I told him that I was also having trouble finding work despite having a college degree, he was quick to blame President Bush for the poor economy. I had no interest in getting into a political debate but merely asked him, “Do you really think one man can single-handedly control the economy?”

It was then the man started to blame white people at large for all the things that were happening around him but he couldn’t explain exactly what that meant or how. It was just “what his gang had taught him” and there was no believing anything different. “You might be the white devil and you don’t even know it,” he said, pointing and calling out the unique color of my eyes. Our faces were near nose to nose. Again, I got nervous as hell trying to think of what to say next. “You know what? I really don’t like you selling drugs out here. You could get killed,” I said.

Who hasn’t been shot?

“Nah bro, I’ve already been shot a few times. If God wanted to take me, he’d already done it.”, then voluntarily lifted up his own hoodie, showing me scars of both the entry and exit wounds. I pretended to not see the gun that was in his pants. It was surreal. I didn’t know a single person who’d ever been shot, and this guy treated it like it was business as usual.

I started to get choked up because this really bothered me. How do we live in the richest country in the world, yet some people believe this is their only option? They aren’t trying to succeed but to merely survive? I’ve never had white guilt because my family has spent 400 years in this country without intergenerational wealth but the injustice here was something I couldn’t internalize. Being from Northwest Indiana, you know more about Chicago because of the media market. With a shooting reported on the news every day, even the uninitiated get numb and desensitized to the repetition.

A Venture off the Beaten Path

I’d rarely given strangers on the street cash (I make them eat with me), but something came over me, and I just wanted this guy to take one day off from the hustle. “Is there an ATM around here?” “Yeah, why?” He pointed to a gas station a few blocks away. “If I give you $40, will you take the rest of the day off and not sell any more drugs?” he laughed. “Well, it’s been pretty slow today, so yeah.” Next thing you know, I’m venturing off into the hood, walking into a rough-looking gas station to pull out cash.

We walked outside and I have him the cash. I didn’t have any advice for him and only shared what my parents taught me: maximize education at all costs, be honest and work hard. With that, I told him to do what was needed to get his GED, as it would open more doors than he thought. He nodded in agreement.

As we got ready to leave, I shook his hand and said, “Hey, I never got your name.” He replied “Robert" to which I responded, “No way, me too!” The guy didn’t believe me, so I had to pull out my driver's license to prove it.

“Maaan, you ain’t bad for a white boy!” and he gave me a ‘man hug’ as his entire demeanor completed changed. The accented “bros” he used to finish most sentences with and the tense interaction we had completely melted away. We were two guys living parallel lives but instantaneously changed forever by this one interaction. After leaving the gas station, we parted ways with a hand shake as he headed to his car and me back to the station.

Robert vindicated gang temperament and interactions I read about months earlier in Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets, a (then new) book I came across after its author was mentioned in Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

Within five minutes, my buddy arrived.. an hour late. When I jumped in the car, I was annoyed from his usual tardiness but quickly realized that if it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have this story. My dad’s timeless wisdom peered through again: don’t assume anything about anyone and you can always learn something from everyone. I grew up on the first rung of the socioeconomic ladder but meeting Robert taught me that some don’t even have one to climb…

I worked on Gary's west side (see the video of C.C. Hooks & Associates below) intermittently from 2003 to 2015, and my employer, (the late) Mr. Hooks, issued manual paychecks. He was averse to the fees banks charged small businesses for direct deposit. It was often hard to get to a bank before or after work (this is before virtual deposits), so I decided to venture off to the closest Chase Bank during since I needed to eat anyway. Google Maps was in its infancy, leading me to a branch at 11th & Roosevelt Street.

My employer, C.C. Hooks & Associates - video taken 2006

The parking lot on the backside of the building was filled, which was odd, so I just parked down the street. As soon as I opened the door, the place was clearly packed with people waiting in line. As a finance major, I thought this might be a run on the bank, but I also knew Chase was “too big to fail.” Even though the bank had legit 20 bulletproof service windows, only one teller was working that day. After I walked in, everyone stopped talking and stared at me. I was the only white person in the joint.

I was already in a mood, burning up my lunch hour, so I stomped out, mumbling, “I don’t have time for this. I’m going downtown.” That’s when a man followed me outside and asked if he could get a ride to the other location. I didn’t even blink before saying, “Yeah, sure,” without realizing what I had committed to. After he jumped into my truck, he introduced himself as Dee, a 55-year-old retired Black man. He then told me he was disabled after getting hit by a semi-truck and was living off of social security disability. I thought it was for another reason: he had a tumor the size of a tennis ball on the back of his neck, pushing his head forward.

“So what was that back there? Why are there so many people at the bank today?,” I asked.

Dee just laughed, “Man, don’t you know?!? It’s the first of the month!”

To me, “First of the Month” was merely a song from an album by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, a rap artist I was introduced to in fifth grade by friends. Their older siblings and cousins always kept them far ahead of me on anything pop culture-related as times changed in our multi-ethnic community. The only other recollection I had of this phrase was when Chris Rock made fun of the song as part of a standup comedy routine in 1996.

I didn’t see the people at the bank as welfare recipients as they were mostly elderly. Dee noted that they were cashing Social Security checks like him, so I felt vindicated that I had never bought into the stereotype the phrase implied.

We arrived downtown at the Old Gary Bank Building at 5th and Broadway. Lo and behold, after walking in, the line was even longer! I’d worked in the city for over three years by this point and had never seen such activity. Next thing you know, Dee and I are traveling another two miles east to the Miller section of the city. The line was nowhere near as long, so I deposited my check but when Dee was finally up, he learned that they did not have bank checks (essentially cashier’s checks). He needed those to pay his NIPSCO (energy) bill.

On our way back, I told him part of this noon-hour exercise was grabbing lunch, so I offered to take him to McDonalds at 5th & Grant since it was on the way back to the office.

Now I have to tell a few sub-stories about this place. Gary is a food desert, and at the time, there weren’t even many fast food options, but this McDonalds was always on fire. I don’t think I have ever seen people hustle so hard for so long – and my order was always right. A few months before meeting Dee, I must have eaten lunch or dinner there four days a week over the summer. A few years later, while dining in, I met Richard Hatcher, the nation’s first Black Mayor of a major city. Our conversation was brief, but I told him how disappointed I was to spend my whole life hearing how bad Gary was, yet my experience with the people couldn’t have been more welcoming. We departed, agreeing that while Gary wasn’t likely to return to the glory days, there would be a lot of opportunity to move the community forward. Sadly, I lost the picture I took with him while transitioning between phones – stupid HTC Touch.

On another occasion, I saw a newspaper sitting at one of the tables. It was called the Gary Crusader. As I flipped through the paper, I noticed all the stories were Afrocentric and positive. It was the opposite of anything I had ever seen written about Gary in a newspaper, full of real stories about real people at the local level and some history splashed in. As I left the paper behind for someone else to enjoy, I only had one question: Why doesn’t anyone else know about this stuff? Today, I recommend Capitol B Gary. (Thanks, William.) This would later inspire my 2015 op-ed about the city.

Okay, back to Dee. Per usual, the drive-through line at this McDs wrapped around the building so we went inside. “So what can I get?” he asked. “You pick, I pay,” I responded. “Really? Are you sure?” he responded. After a few back-and-forths for confirmation, it became clear this man was very poor. I forced him to get the Big Mac meal and supersize it, but I still picked off the dollar menu.

After we sat down, the conversation ran the gamut. We talked about the City of Gary and its history of politics, corruption, racism, poverty, and steel, among other topics. It was Gary’s 100th anniversary, and I’d recently finished Gary’s First Hundred Years after seeing it displayed at Barnes & Noble. To say I was eager to talk to anyone about what I learned was an understatement. In between the topics, he kept thanking me for lunch. It must have been five or six times. At first, I was annoyed, then realized he was filled with gratitude.

Dee asked me why I was so nice, how I became so productive, and how I had such a good head on my shoulders. To me, it was simple. My parents raised me to say please and thank you, show up on time, open doors for people, and treat them fairly. Values are free. “You know, they also told me not to pick up strangers,” as I smiled. “Guess I didn’t follow all of their advice.” then I shrugged. He laughed. That’s when we started rapping about Christianity.

“For a split second, I thought you could be a scammer looking to carjack me. After my conversion, I learned to accept the fate of my decisions and acknowledged there is a greater power out there who is ultimately in control,” I said.

He said, “Yeah, I didn’t think for a split second you'd say yes to giving me a ride, much less driving me all across the city and buying lunch.”

After we finished up, he asked that I drop him off at the downtown Chase instead of where I picked him up. This indicated to me that he didn’t have a car. The line was still there, but after all, he had bills to pay.

“Tell everyone you have a white friend named Robert who is going to run for mayor one day.” I smiled, and he laughed. (Mind you, I was completely apolitical throughout college and wouldn't have know how to run for office if my life depended on it.) After getting out of the truck, he asked me for fifty cents, but I spotted him a dollar for good measure. Dee said he hoped to cross my path again. I agreed with a hearty handshake.

When I returned to the office, Mr. Hooks asked, “Where have you been?!?” I was unusually gone for about an hour and a half, but I responded, “Okay, you’re not going to believe this, but I was hanging out with a disabled, old Black man, chauffeuring him all over the city. looking for a bank” After telling an abridged version of my story, he said he expected no different of me in such a situation.

After that day, I started depositing my checks at that branch whenever I could, hoping to run into Dee again, but it never happened. Instead, I met other people, and was told on more than one occasion that I was the only white person they had ever seen in the place. One gal even started offering me directions, thinking I’d come in lost.

After all, the location wasn’t exactly on the main drag of 4th and 5th Ave, where whites merely pass through the city on their way to their employment in and around the steel industry. A few years ago, while visiting home from D.C., I drove around my beloved Northwest Indiana to see how things have changed since my departure. The building had clearly been abandoned several years earlier, but the memories I have are still intact. When I think of the “First of the Month,” I’m reminded of Dee, just another guy trying to make it one day at a time and one of the coolest cats I’ve ever met.

Matt knows how to deliver both compassion and accountability, but at this moment, he said I had to get it together and look the part if I planned to show up to represent the brand. In addition, I needed to get back under 175 pounds to stay in the lightweight division for powerlifting contests. At 176 pounds, I would have to compete against men much taller and hence, stronger.

Knowing that Reynolds was hosting a deadlifting contest in his garage upon my arrival, I had to figure out how to lose fat AND preserve muscle at the same time. While I do not advocate for the “white knuckle discipline” approach (because it is unsustainable), the goal of this post is to present exactly how I achieved such an extreme goal and to show readers the most simplified view of nutrition and fitness so they can reach their personal goals in 2025.

Americans are obsessed with “losing weight” and “being skinny,” but the number on the scale is just one metric of health. Body Mass Index (BMI) is probably the least helpful number as well. The reality is we are all in the “extreme sport of aging,” as cited in The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40.

Simply put, strength is your natural existence in the world, and once you lose it, you’re dead. Everyday is quite literally a fight against gravity and the barbell is the most simple and effective tool to keep you vertical for the long haul. Your body works as a system and should be trained as such. Unless you are going for aesthetics, workout machines are far less efficient = more time and less results. My biggest abs have come from 350-pound squats, not endless situps. Your driver should ask yourself first: “What is my WHY?”

For me, it’s a quality of life issue. Strength training makes everything else in life easier and I can attest that there are significant mental benefits from the refining process as well.

Understanding Nutrition

Calories: There are no bones about it. If you are going to lose fat, you have to run consistent calorie deficits. The problem is that if you want to gain muscle, you need to run a calorie surplus. As you age, the quality of calories matters too. With the three types of energy systems humans utilize, it is not possible to put on 100% muscle or lose 100% fat (even on performance enhancing drugs) BUT you can control the RATIO by eating clean and understanding macronutrients. I know first hand that the “dirty bulking” high school football players do with PB&J sandwiches is not a thing after age 35.

Macronutrients (Macros): Protein, Fat, Carbohydrates…and alcohol

Protein - 4 calories per gram. You need this to both recover and build muscle. My metric is 1g of protein per 1lb of body weight per day. If I lift heavy and miss my protein number by 25g or so, I am incredibly sore. It’s important to note that muscle soreness and (accumulated) fatigue are not the same thing. During my 825 mile 10-day cycling trip from Washington, D.C. to the Indiana Dunes in August, I was only sore one day after climbing 6,500 feet over 105 miles. When I returned to D.C. just a day after the ride, deadlifting came back fast (started at 315 pounds) as my lower back and hamstrings felt great but I had to drop my squat down over 120 pounds (to 185). Cycling is almost a purely quad workout and while they were never sore, the fatigue lasted for more than three weeks.

Fat - 9 calories per gram. Your body needs fat to operate but understand, it is in its final form. You are what you eat here. For fat loss, I ate less than 50 grams of fat per day and tried to get it naturally from the meat I was eating as well as from cooking sources like olive oil and butter so you can still enjoy the taste of things…like vegetables. Various nuts are my other play but you have to regulate yourself to a palmful which is one serving (1oz). Not easy! Note: fat is more than twice the calories of proteins and carbs so if you cut here you have a lot of room left over.

Carbohydrates - 4 calories per gram. This is the most contentious part of the nutrition world. Yes, if you are obese and looking to shed big pounds without exercising, zero carb diets like Keto get “instant results” because fat is satiating and hence, you eat less - but this is not the best long term strategy. Some believe that carbs = sugar = makes you more hungry. If you eat real food, which has fiber and lowers the glycemic index (GI), this won’t happen. I’ve never had hunger issues after a bowl of rice or oatmeal. If you are going to strength train, carbs are needed to fuel that movement. A person can store roughly 2-5g per pound of bodyweight as glycogen in your muscles – that’s a lot! Understand that carbs will make your muscles retain water so you might not feel skinnier but keep the mid and long term goals in mind and don’t obsess about the day to day scale or waist measurements. “Confusion marketing” is a thing in the industry and they prey on people’s insecurities. For women, I recommend the work of Barball Logic staff Niki Sims, an expert in the psychology of training in/around the monthly cycle or Nikki Burman when it comes to strength training during pregnancy and postpartum. These gals cut through all the non-sense sent to you by big business.

Alcohol - 7 calories per gram. This is the fourth macro you didn’t even know about. As a whiskey advocate, it pains me to write that alcohol is the devil when it comes to your fat loss goals. Booze operates like a half carb, half fat. It acts like sugar with no fiber so it messes with your blood sugar level, making you more hungry. Alcohol also operates like a fat because it has a high caloric load, but with little/no nutritional value, the equivalent of putting water in your gas tank. 100 calories of beer and 100 calories of green beans are not the same. If you are serious about cutting fat, abstinence is the only way here. Just think, ‘barrel strength’ whiskey is about 120 proof, which is essentially 120 calories per ounce – yikes!

Brett McKay, owner of the Art of Manliness, is also a client of Coach Reynolds. He has a podcast episode, Lose Weight and Keep It Off With Flexible Dieting where he explains his eating style “if it fits my macros.” I tend to follow this advice and “eyeball” my food with roughly 50% carb, 30% protein and 20% fat, however, this short term fat loss goal I completed required more extreme day to day swings. Weighing food is time consuming so unless you feel like you need the precision, just consider a fist full of anything to be considered one serving.

Strength vs. Cardio

Strength is slowly gained and slowly lost. Cardio is quickly gained and quickly lost. Either way, you need to be consistent with both. You can get leaner by just lifting but there are benefits to increasing your cardiovascular health. I see a lot of “skinny fat” retirees at the globo gyms because they are obsessed with weight and excessive high intensity cardio quite literally burns your muscle off. We already lose muscle as we age so there’s no reason to expedite the process. Strength training is a hedge for the unforeseen. If you get cancer, is it better to be strong and fluffy or skinny and weak? Which person will be able to endure chemo or radiation longer? There is a saying: “plan for the best but prepare for the worst. Be strong first, fast second.”

Know Your Biomarkers & Baselines

At 5’7”, my Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) is a little under 1,800 calories. That is how much I burn sitting at a desk each day.

The Plan: My goal was to preserve muscle and lose 10 pounds of fat. A pound of fat is 3,500 calories. To lose 10 pounds of fat, that would be 35,000 in calorie deficits. To achieve this 25 days, that would be 1,400 per day – mathematically pretty impossible unless you starve yourself. Most coaches recommend no more than 500 calorie deficits per day so you’d lose basically one pound of fat per week. Depressingly slow.

Over the past few years, I noticed after long bike rides, my lifting the next day would go to crap. Going back to the three primary energy systems, the body can utilize carbs, fats or proteins to get you moving. A heart rate is the “fat burn zone” can be achieved by walking but that will be a time suck. High intensity interval training (HIIT) is by far the most efficient way to spend an hour.

In many ways, CrossFit falls into this category. Since I wanted to enjoy the process, I chose cycling and learned how to get the maximum fat burn benefit vs time without losing strength by maintaining a heart rate of 145 BPM. This would be the same as hiking and rucking, using stairs or a stair master at the gym. I oppose running because my base heart rate is 170+ and while it's a high calorie expenditure, it destroys your strength and quite frankly, just makes me hungry and tired. It’s also hard on the joints. As a former 5-minute miler, there are just so many better options out there. What I have learned over the years is whether I strength train or perform steady state cardio, I burn roughly 500 calories an hour so I factor that in on top of my RMR for calories burned per day.

Presenting at the Barbell Logic Annual Staff Conference

Plan of Action

Day 1:

• Strength Train: Two routines: 1) squat and deadlift or 2) strict press, bench-press with a three-set mini-circuit of weighted (25lb) chinups, weighted dips and barbell curls to exhaustion. This causes hypertrophy, which is what makes your muscles physically larger. It’s also bonus cardio at the end of a workout. Sometimes I would bike around town for 30 minutes afterward.

• Nutrition: focus on 175g (700 calories) of protein, 1g per lb of body weight to repair the muscles. The rest would be carbs and keep the fat under 50g.

• Deficit target: at least 1,000 calories. RMR -1800 + Lifting -500 = -2300. With 700c of protein, I was still left with 600 calories left for both carbs and fat.

Day 2:

• Cardio. I would cycle fasted (no breakfast) for two hours starting at 5 a.m., keeping my heart rate at that sweet spot of 145 BPM to maximize calories burned without losing muscle.

• Nutrition: Low intensity cardio doesn’t tear muscle fibers much so you don’t need as much protein to recover. The goal here was to fast as long as possible then dump truck as many carbs in the evening to store them as glycogen in my muscles for the next morning’s lift.

• Deficit Target: at least 500 calories. RMR -1800 + Cycling -1000 = -2800. A 500 deficit = 2300 I get to eat, which could be 575g of carbs!

Day 3 & 4 etc: Rise, Wash and Repeat Days 1 & 2 until white knuckle discipline blows up!

Results: I reached my goal the day before flying out. There were two times during that month where I showed up at the gym and could barely move – it felt something like pure exhaustion but working in Congress has its own element of fatigue that may have been a factor. Again, I don’t recommend wildly oscillating between heavy protein and heavy carb days. For the most part, I was able to hit all of the numbers Matt programmed for me, but I had no idea exactly how strong I was. After two flights, I landed at the event just as the deadlift competition was underway. I pulled 455 pounds which tied my all time best which was set a little over a year earlier in June 2022. I swear having people cheer you on adds 30 pounds to any lift too.

Competing in an online competition in June 2022

How I did it:

Food Tracking: I used the app Cronometer, recommended by popular YouTuber Thomas Frank, also a client of Coach Reynolds. It has a lot more nuanced foods than MyFitnessPal (MFP) and because users enter the food data on that app, there are many calorie counters out there that don’t input the macros. In many ways, MFP was not helpful to me. The free version of Cronometer allows you to see macro ratios as well as whether or not you want to factor your workout calories into the overall goal by linking with other apps – I love the barcode scanner too. I used my Apple Watch for lifting and Garmin computer for cycling. Since I have a wheat allergy, which led to an ethmoid surgery in 2022 and balloonplasty in 2023, my diet is clean by default since “enriched wheat” is in just about every junk food out there. It’s important to keep easy “open and consume” snacks on hand because you will get hungry. My default emergency lunch/dinner for the past 20 years has been Chipotle as it’s the “best price per calorie” in the industry ,and lifters have been doing the beans, rice, and chicken thing for a lot longer.

Strength Tracking: I’ve been a client of Barbell Logic since 2019. Coach Reynolds does ALL of my programming, I just show up and do the work. All the data is saved in an app they designed called TurnKeyCoach (TKC) which they license to any online coaches. You can find all of their services here.

Cardio Tracking: As a cyclist, there are two ways to track calories and performance: a heart rate monitor and a power meter. Most of D.C. is pretty flat so I just tried to keep my HR at 145 BPM so I got the biggest bang for my buck for the time spent. Not many people out at 5 a.m.!

Family: I have the luxury of being single with no children, which is a significant advantage when it comes to controlling the ability to show up to the gym as well as what goes in my mouth. I understand spousal food preferences, crazy kid schedules with after school sports and the like can make both training and eating well difficult. I’d strongly ask you to consider buying Coach Reynold’s new book, Undoing Urgency: Reclaim Your Time For The Things That Matter Most. It’s an easy read for anyone and will give you action items to follow. I just finished it and will be putting several items from it into practice for 2025.

Conclusion

Building muscle is hard. Losing fat is even harder. Author Nassim Taleb said in Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, “Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.” Instead of hunting or farming, unlimited calories can be brought to our door within minutes. We’ve removed every physical adversity needed to survive and with the creation of social media, some are trying to do the same on the mental side. The reality is humans evolved BECAUSE of scarcity and hardship, both mental and physical. A lot of it was involuntary, not of our choosing, but it was impossible to escape. It has been said “no pain, no gain” and the reality is we need to pursue voluntary hardship, aka getting under a heavy barbell because that is how we will be refined and better prepared for when the involuntary hardships in life come.

If you are looking to make a nutrition change in the new year, I recommend starting with Barbell Logic’s 10 Day Challenge. Most regimens are all about taking things away but the developer of this program, Gillian Ward, has a keen understanding of our relationships with food so 9 out of the 10 days includes adding something to your habits.

Now that you know the plan, it's time to put it into action. I'm going to try this regimen again and will report back at the end of January with a progress report. Happy New Year!

I landed in January of 2017 as a Washington Scholars Program (WSP) Fellow within the legal center at The Heritage Foundation. While sounding prestigious, it was just a guaranteed position as an intern. Later, I learned from the folks running Heritage’s Young Leaders Program that hundreds of kids apply for those four spots every semester. The staff we worked under have some of the sharpest minds in the nation, if not the world.

With former Heritage Trustee, The Hon. Edwin Meese III

After shutting down my menswear retail store, I hit the reset button. I thought acquiring a full-time job in DC would be easy after Republicans won the House, Senate, and Presidency. I assumed wrong. Despite doing several “informational interviews” around Washington, the internship came and went, leaving me without a job. I was booted from intern housing a week later as they prepared for the next group of young leaders. I was unemployed for about 45 days through May and part of June, the longest since turning 18 in 2003. That period felt like an eternity, but it taught me much about myself.

During my quest for work, I also learned a lot about others, but the folks I hung out with late at night while job searching weren’t exactly Ivy Leaguers or politicos. In fact, they were the exact opposite, and that’s what I enjoyed about them.

For those of us with a productivity complex, being unemployed has to be one of the worst feelings. Not being able to make a meaningful contribution to society is depressing. However, W2 income shows our dependence on ‘the system.’ For thousands of years, men have been saying, “You only eat what you kill,” which is now the language of salesmen.

With that, I hung a shingle and started Capitol Hill Clothiers. I had a custom clothing certification from the CTDA in NYC but was unfamiliar with my manufacturer's measuring and fitting processes. The few sales I brought in the door from my limited network were less than profitable from all the remakes. I stuck it out because passion and perseverance go a long way, and menswear has long been part of my personal identity.

They say luck is when preparation meets opportunity. I took a page from my best friend’s insurance sales book, the One Card System. The science developed by the author is activity tracking: make 40 calls a day, 25 pick up, set appointments with 15, and keep 10. Of the ten you meet with, only three are actual prospects, and one will become a client. But of that one, 60% will become a client in the first year, 30% in year two, and the last 10% in year three. That’s a LOT of calls to build a client base. I used that same model to build a personal brand and secure a job.

With that activity, I averaged eight “informational interviews” per day in and around Capitol Hill. Other than graduating at the beginning of the Great Recession in December 2007, it was the hardest I have ever worked looking for a paycheck.

After grinding all day, meeting with people, and drinking around a gallon of coffee daily, the caffeine would set in hours later as I headed out to every evening Happy Hour (HH) possible. You can eat and drink in the city for free every night with the correct list. Just temper your expectations when it comes to quality. It was easy to network because, at the time, I was dressed to the nines in three-piece plaid, windowpane, and glen check suits with well-matching ties and shoes. People enjoyed hearing more about my work at Brooks Brothers and JCrew than talking about politics. So when people ask the repetitive DC question, “What do you do?” I just told them I was a haberdasher who liked politics.

Midnight McDonalds

When the party was over, I was always the last one standing. This stands in contrast to my lifelong 4:30 a.m. wake-up to be at the gym by 5. (see the book The 5AM Club) It was always well after midnight when I headed home. Pre-COVID, the McDonalds at Union Station was the only place open 24/7 where one could ball on a budget to prevent a hangover. In the wee hours of the morning, the panhandlers and homeless were always there waiting for me. They were disproportionately Black and male.

You could tell the other drunkards were scared of them because of the way they nervously approached the counter, waited at a distance, and then snapped up their food like an eagle coming out of left field. Perhaps I’ve watched American History X one too many times, or it’s the many years I spent working in Gary, but I’ve never felt unsafe around such a demographic.

My high school government teacher taught me the phrase, "There's no such thing as a free lunch.” I don’t remember the context of the quote but it stuck with me. Back when the dollar menu was a thing, I submitted to the food requests from these strangers on one condition: they had to eat with me. The inspiration came from the book Never Eat Alone. I firmly believe that ALL humans have time, treasure, and/or talent. I didn’t know these folks; I assumed they had no treasure, so I would take their time and learn about their talent.

Above, I mentioned the ‘hard skills’ of sales via activity. The ‘soft skills’ are all language-based. The key to learning how people tick is asking endless ‘why’ questions. For this group, I always started with: "Tell me how you got to where you are today."

With every person, I learn something new. The only unifying pattern I could recognize is that each had a defining event that sent them spiraling downward. A divorce, loss of job, family tragedy. Some of their challenges were started by drug and alcohol abuse, and others led to that pattern after the fact, compounding their situation. For the former, their use and abuse started as a coping mechanism from events that accumulated throughout their childhood.

Here I was, in the most powerful city in the world, one that never endures a recession, where government jobs and contractors can be created out of thin air on command for all walks of life but there’s an underbelly of folks that have fallen behind and are often ignored. A small percentage of society is probably best served by a caretaking institution, but most of the folks I met could benefit from remediation and/or rehabilitation. They just needed some stability and guidance…maybe even compassion and love.

There is a fork in the road when it comes to personal misfortunes. Some people are anti-fragile and actually get stronger from adversity, but others completely break and never recover. It is not clear to me if this is nature or nurture or a combination of the two. As a spectator to my Dad’s five-year battle with ALS, I wanted to give up many times – on myself, my family, and my community. It was ingrained every single day by Dad, even through his disease: failing was okay, but giving up was not.

Two of the many men I met at McDonald’s late at night while I pursued work in DC.

Accidental Courtesy

There is a racial parallel here. During unemployment, I came across a relatively new documentary, Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & America. Daryl was born the same year as my Dad and lived just a few miles apart (Chicago and Gary), but Daryl attended an international school as his dad was a foreign service officer. Like him, I grew up with a lot of people from different backgrounds where prejudice and racism weren’t a thing. I was also cognizant that various media sources tried to condition me to a stereotype that Gary, Indiana = poor, poor = Black, Black = crime, crime = bad, therefore Black = bad. My personal experience working in the city for over a decade says the opposite. It led to my 2015 op-ed in the NWI Times: Entire region has stake in Gary's future.

After returning to the U.S., Daryl experienced the sting of racism firsthand as a Black man and has since spent his life pursuing the question, “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?” That led him to start meeting with KKK members to understand the root cause… the WHY of their hate. Like the Black men I met at Union Station, Daryl’s encounters with white men have a similar two-pronged theme. Some were born into a rural white existence and conditioned (via victimhood mentality) from the beginning that someone else is the source of their woes. Daryl also showed that one-time events like divorce can send a man spiraling, whereas the Klan provided meaning and purpose, leading to some irrational hate of some person or group he’s never met.

In a follow-up with a Black Lives Matter activist, Daryl explains that his goal is to change people's mindset through multiple meetings. Some of his sentiments are captured in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

I have stacks of books on masculinity, and it can not be stated enough how important it is for men to be associated with a (good) tribe. There is no such thing as a lone wolf. Whether it’s the rural whites joining the Klan or the inner city Blacks joining the local gang, in the absence of positive male influences, vulnerable men will follow anyone who is perceived to be a leader of men. Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity shows that this theme is universal worldwide and transcends religion, politics, and time.

Heritage has the best security. Wish I could say I won this arm wrestling contest with Ron.

Saul Alinksy & Community Organizing

When I lived in Lincoln Park, Chicago, during the Fall of 2008, there was a lot of euphoria surrounding presidential candidate Obama, so I read everything I could about him. His background as a community organizer led me to read both Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals by Saul Alinksy. I enjoyed the latter regarding his approach to building “The Peoples Organization.”

Much like my native Lake County, Indiana, the southside of Chicago was inhabited by several ethnicities and races, many of whom hated each other for several reasons, one being economic security. Alinksy, a self-described ‘radical’ trashes the “overeducated (white) liberals” because they come into poor communities looking to fix problems from the top down with their one-size-fits-all program that dehumanizes people through questionnaires. They are ‘long on education, short on lived experience’. Instead, he believes in ‘native leadership’, finding the local person with such attributes and empowering them with whatever tools they need to solve local community issues.

Like Daryl and myself, Alinksy asks a lot of WHY questions to root out individuals' bigotry but he doesn’t judge them. Instead, he then uses that information to unify working-class people from various ethnic and racial backrounds by helping them focus on what they have in common. Through much of the 20th century, Big Business often preyed on this insecure group and used division to prevent unionization. Despite its legacy with racial challenges, there is an untold story of interracial solidary in Gary, Indiana, during the Steel Strike of 1919.

Conclusion

FUNemployment, as they call it, was not at all enjoyable but I learned a lot about myself in the process. With that, I wanted to pass on the experience to help others who are unemployed, between jobs or looking for their first one in DC. That insight led to me to speak multiple times to participants of Leadership Institute’s two-day program, Capitol Hill Staff Training. My three subtopics were how to Get to the Hill, what to do when you get there, and when to move up or move on. Since then, I’ve been able to apply those methods to other aspects of my life.

I learned even more about the men I spent time with at McDonalds. It reaffirmed that someone else always has it worse when times are tough, so be grateful. Additionally, I was reminded of the importance of showing others grace. We have no idea where people come from or what led to their current state. With compassion, it is our duty to help them get where they are going. Instead of assuming their condition or the solution to their problems, it takes humility to withhold judgment and first ask WHY.