Hi, I'm Justin Kendall.

I'm the co-owner of Main Street Books and Second Flight Books in Lafayette, Indiana.

I'm originally from Frankfort, Indiana, and first moved to Lafayette in 2009 to go to Ivy Tech. I'm the first person in my family to attend college and come from a long line of hard-working factory workers who wanted nothing more than to go put in a day of hard, honest work, then go home, be with their family, and be left to live their lives in peace.

Growing up, I watched my entire extended family come home every day just a little bit more beat down than they were the previous day, trying to make it through to the day where they could retire. Unfortunately for almost all of them, well before they reached retirement age, their bodies had given out, preventing them from fully enjoying the retirement they'd worked all their lives to build. I knew I had to find a different route or die trying. Most of my early childhood years were spent reading library books whenever I didn't have homework or chores. Video games and computers absolutely stole me away from books when those were purchased by my friends and their families and I experienced them for the first time. It would take quite a few years to come back to reading for fun.

When I'd finally saved up enough money to only be slightly terrified to take the dive into student debt and go to college, I dove into information technology and spent every waking hour for about 7 years getting every professional certification in every technology area I could get my hands on. I learned to break down technology and business operations puzzles and think in terms of systems and outcomes. I rarely saw my family or friends and barely spent time with my wife, all so I could secure a more rewarding career than my parents had. I remember dreaming back in 2010 that if I could just do well enough to make $40,000 a year, I'd be set for life. I think I was surviving on about $11,000 a year in those days.

From 2012 through 2026, I worked in the tech industry as a call center consultant for a large corporate behemoth, where I mostly was rented out to help state government better serve its residents. I got lucky enough to land in a technology area that needed all of those different individual technologies I'd spent all that time learning. I was the lead call center engineer for a state government for 11 of those years, where I consulted with, designed and implemented solutions for, and managed infrastructure for, around 25 agencies. I worked on projects that allowed residents to better access programs like SNAP and Medicaid. Projects that made the process easier for parents to deal with child support. Saved millions of dollars for taxpayers. Many others over the years. I spent the first year of COVID working day and night, 7 days a week, redesigning and rebuilding whole systems so the flood of unemployed people could access unemployment, hopefully before they became homeless. I tried to hold my employer back from doing the sort of smarmy giant corporate contractor things that giant corporate contractors are known for.

My wife and I started Second Flight Books in 2016 when we heard that one of Lafayette's two independent bookstores was closing. We didn't have much money, but we were able to work out a deal, it was my wife's dream job, and I'd started my days loving to read. In order to get things off the ground, we spent the next 9 years both working many hours each week on our store, and I continued also working full time in tech.

The joke was on me somewhat, I guess. All of that work from 2009 through 2025 working the equivalent of 2 full-time desk jobs (and for some periods more), left me exhausted both physically and mentally, with multiple undiagnosed medical conditions, not all that unlike all of my family I watched growing up. Still not enough savings to believe I can survive an unexpected serious medical emergency, and not enough savings to believe we can financially support having children, keep our heads above water, and ever get to retire ourselves, let alone have the time in the day. Now I have a parent and a sibling that need financial support due to health issues. I do not understand how I could have honestly worked any more effectively to make a better life for myself and to have a family. Maybe this is why some people decide to get ahead dishonestly.

I'm only here today because of the support of the Lafayette community. I've learned a lot this past decade: how vital having independent bookstores are for vibrant communities, how rewarding it is to connect people that love the same things that would likely otherwise never meet, the importance of supporting local businesses and people, the excesses of giant corporations, the many ways our political representatives are throwing their citizens to the wolves so they can enrich themselves, and just how important it is to make this country start living up to the ideals in the Constitution again. If it ever did.

I'm tired of watching giant corporations and corporate politicians gaslight hard-working Hoosiers into thinking that if they just work a bit harder, their situation will magically get better. All while they're continually stacking the deck in their favor.