Some time ago I mentioned that my friend John Ray finally bought his first television set. Really, I thought. Welcome to my world, I told him. Now, you can watch all those cable news shows with politicians rudely shouting at each other and three-hour baseball games that include nearly 50 minutes of commercials.
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“No problem,” he replied. “I don’t have a dish. I can get the Chicago stations and a couple from Indiana. That’s enough for me.”
“So, you get your news from the internet?”
“I don’t have internet service,” John said proudly. “I don’t have Facebook, I don’t even have a cell phone and I do fine.”
My friend John says he reads a lot and perhaps Henry David Thoreau is his favorite author. More than 150 years ago, a grumpy Thoreau wrote that new inventions are merely toys that divert us from serious things and are “an easy path toward distraction.”
He contemplated the plan for building a telegraph line stretching from Maine to Texas and wondered if Maine and Texas had anything important to say to each other.
“We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new,” he continued, but added that perhaps “the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”
Maybe John Ray has the right idea.
We seem to be overwhelmed by technology that keeps changing. Four months ago, I dumped my old flip phone for a glitzy new smart phone which, alas, is much smarter than me. Last week, I mentioned to “The Woman” or better known as wife, I could not answer a telephone call on the contraption. “I tap the phone and nothing happens,” I told her.
She gave me that exasperated look one usually reserves for a bad puppy. “You don’t tap,” she said. “You swipe.” She showed me. “See! Now you know!”
I almost replied “arf arf.”
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In four months or so Lincoln Mall, once the Village of Matteson’s great cash cow, will be no more; having fallen victim to changing shopping patterns and years of neglect by various real estate operators. According to Mike Nolan’s detailed story in last week’s Southtown, by mid-September only a Carson’s stand-alone store will remain on what was the center’s large footprint.
Lincoln Mall’s death knell followed similar patterns that laid waste to other shopping centers.
For two decades, the Park Forest Plaza, despite being tucked away in the center of the village, was the commercial magnet drawing shoppers from Indiana to Joliet. Old-timers will tell you the Plaza was the wrecking ball that demolished shopping in Chicago Heights. In turn, the Plaza declined after River Oaks in Calumet City opened in 1966 followed by the Lincoln Mall development in the early 1970s.
It was dog-eat-dog in combat where the biggest dog with the best location usually won. Some Park Forest residents claim that when Sears pulled up its anchor from the Plaza and moved to Matteson, numerous citizens promised never again to buy anything at the store. It may have taken 20 years, but if you read the biz news about the company, that campaign seems to have worked.
And when Orland Square opened its huge doors in 1976, the rush westward was on. Once you turn on the ignition on your car, you can go anywhere to spend your money.
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A friend of ours, a member of the clergy in the south suburbs, was driving in Homewood the other week, when, at a stop light, a driver pulled up, rolled down his window and began cursing.
“Bleep you crooked Hillary,” he began.
Our friend had a small Hillary Clinton sticker on the car’s rear bumper which apparently triggered this moron’s wrath.
“Bleep you Hillary” he continued. He concluded with “Donald Trump makes us great.” The light changed and our friend said, “I was too stunned to record his license and when the light turned green I let him proceed first because I didn’t want him following me.”
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God bless America – please.
Jerry Shnay is a freelance journalist and can be reached at [email protected].