Revisiting Hate, DEI and Other Rip-Roaring (wink-wink) Topics

By The Times of Noblesville | February 5, 2025 |

Continued Scattershooting while wondering whatever happened to Eddie Adams . . .

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HATERS GOT to hate, and boy did last week’s comments about DEI / MEI bring them out of the woodwork!

To recap, I offered a tip of the seed corn cap (as my pal Honest Hoosier might say) to new Indiana Gov. Mike Braun for replacing the Diversity-Equity-Inclusion push with MEI – Merit-Excellence-Innovation.

The big pushback was that Braun opened the floodgates to discrimination and that his new MEI initiative set back the Hoosier State by decades.

One of the points I made – and most of the haters seemed to miss – is that we already have laws, policies and procedures in place that make discriminating against anyone for reasons of race, sex, religion illegal.

The other big point they missed is that you can’t legislate stupid. And that seems to be a huge roadblock for so many things the left says. They want the world to be perfect – and good for them – but it’s never going to be. That’s not pessimistic, just realistic. So we do the best we can with what we have and we keep moving forward.

Haters and others who simply want to stomp their feet and scream like 2-year-olds throwing a tantrum aren’t contributing. Not my place to tell them how to live, but if they really want to effect change, maybe a civil conversation wouldn’t hurt?

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SADLY, IT’S time for the annual fight over daylight savings time. I just don’t get how this is such a big deal – and especially how the economic development folks wring their hands over this stuff.

C’mon, we live in a pretty complex world today. The Internet has connected us across time zones, oceans and continents. Do people believe we really can’t figure out a 60-minute difference?

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ALSO ON the sad note category, our friends at the Indiana Legislature are once again trying to take public notices away from your friendly neighborhood newspapers. The hired hands cite declining circulation, costs and, amazingly, ease of access.

Here’re some facts.

  • First, no arguments on declining print subscriptions. That’s nothing new – and again, our friends in Indianapolis have pounded on this fact for years. But what they fail to mention is the exploding digital side of newspapers. For example, here in Noblesville we have almost five times as many digital subscribers as we do print. Add to that the reach of our website and it’s pretty astounding.
  • Costs? I say this with all due respect, but when’s the last time our government at almost any level did something better and cheaper than the private sector? This is another good example. The state wants to create a website for public notices. That means they’ll have to pay someone to do that and they’ll have to pay for the online platform.

Why do that when the Hoosier State Press Association already does it – at no additional cost at www.publicnoticeindiana.com ?

Plus, and I’ve made this point for years – public notice ads cost less than 1 percent of government budgets. Way less!

  • Ease of access? OK, I get the concept that having one website means you just have to click one time. But what happens when you get there? It’d be like looking for a needle in a haystack of needles. Public notices being published on our pages means you may have to turn five or six pages, but it’s nothing like a gazillion megabytes of data to sift through.
  • Last point – and again, something said in this space many times. Imagine you have a teenage daughter who asks if her boyfriend can come to the house to study. Then imagine if she says they’re going to study in her room instead of the dining room table. Then imagine they close the door. Suddenly a healthy situation goes from warm and fuzzy to downright alarming.

It’s all about transparency and trust. And the more transparent things are, the easier it is to trust.

If the government is allowed to manage their own public notice ads with no independent third party like a newspaper, how warm and fuzzy does that feel?

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LEST YOU think all I do is gripe about our good folks in Indianapolis, here’s a tip of the seed corn cap to Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales. He has his enemies, but I like the fact that he’s not just sitting behind a desk in Indianapolis. He’s out and about and visiting Indiana counties and talking to common folks like you and I.

Haters got to hate, but I appreciate his efforts!

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THIS IS American Heart Month and as a guy with a pretty good sized horizontal scar on his chest, please take it from me that heart health is nothing to sluff off.

I won’t cram this down your throats, but thanks to my friends at the American Heart Association, here are some good tips worth knowing.

By the way, the first Friday in February is Wear Red Day in honor of the month. Hope you join me in painting the town, or at least our attire that day, red!

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EDDIE ADAMS was a photographer for The Associated Press after serving with the United States Marine Corps in Korea. You may not know his name, but if you are of a certain age (and by reading these scribbles chances are you are), you’ll likely remember the photo in 1968 of a South Vietnamese soldier shooting a Viet Cong captain in the side of the head on a Saigon street. Adams won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for that photo.

More than anything though, it is a stark statement on the difference between the world we grew up in and the one we live in today. We saw images of war on our TV sets every night and no one warned us beforehand that this might be disturbing.

That’s not a slam on anyone today. But the world is cold and cruel in many places and ignoring, hiding or downplaying it doesn’t do anyone any good.

Two cents, which is about how much Timmons said his columns are worth, appears periodically in The Times. Timmons is the chief executive officer of Sagamore News Media, the company that owns The Noblesville Times. He is also a proud Noblesville High School graduate and can be contacted at [email protected].

Posted in Columnists, Tim Timmons

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