Musings - on the editor's mind

Last week I went into the Big K store in Burlington. My ten minutes there were quite an eye opener. I went looking for razor blades, still an in-person purchase item for most of us. That’s the type of thing for which I shop. And I don’t shop much period, being fortunate to be comfortable with few wants.

I am more of a Luddite then an internet surfer. Still, I get the power of Amazon. My friends all have empty – or full – Amazon prime boxes in their homes.

And, I can’t remember the last time I went shopping with anyone.

Maybe walking through Big K is no different than walking through Kohl’s or Macy’s. Maybe all big box stores have half empty shelves and limited choices from cutting deals with near monopolistic corporations. I have a Schick razor. Only Gillette accessories were on the hooks and shelves in Burlington.

I haven’t been in the third world, but I have shopped central city stores. My shopping spree seemed very third world. If that is the future of retail, shopping with delivery by drone will win. The future then: our communities and culture will continue to be hollowed out by our acquiescence to the titans of industry. If we all bow to the highest good of high profit to the few, then most of us will stay on bended knee, our faces ever closer to the mud.

We are all creating, my fellow consumers, lives of comfort, convenience and isolation. We are increasingly, like Scrooge, cutting ourselves off from our sisters and brothers.

Recall this scene from “A Christmas Carol:”

Scrooge said to his visiting nephew Fred, “Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”

‘Keep it!’ repeated Scrooge’s nephew. ‘But you don’t keep it.’

‘Let me leave it alone, then,’ said Scrooge.”

We, and there is not a mouse in my pocket, want to sing carols on Gilkey Square just after we leave our holed up quarters where we ordered presents for everyone from our home office cubby hole.

Our actions and interactions with the all mighty dollar define us first and last.

We can’t be, or have, everything. I'd much rather buy a leather belt or a wool sweater from someone who made it and whose name I know then get mass produced items at a fraction of the cost from a drone that dropped it at my front door, all the while recording video and reporting data back to the mother ship of an omnipresent, detached global corporation.

That’s what I want, neighbor. I want you present in my life.

Is that so much to desire? - Ken Stern