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| They used to mean more: our coins |
Most people will start doing the obvious things to recognize the holidays. Decorations go up. We see the appropriate ads in the media of course. We have just experienced "Black Friday." Was Black Friday all that big a deal for you? Hasn't the media with its advertising just pushed along that "phenomenon?" For America's smaller communities, I doubt that Black Friday means a whole lot. Maybe you'd have to drive to the nearest city that has a "big box store."
I never heard the term "big box" when growing up. Here in Morris we shopped in the "business district" otherwise known as main street, and pushed coins into parking meters. Parking meters? Getting ever more obscure in our collective memory. Better be paid up or risk a ticket.
Was the Parade of Lights a success in Morris?
I see where the Morris newspaper is raising the price of its product. In the old days when the paper was considerably larger - coming out twice a week - people could be very sensitive about a slight price rise. A rise amounting to small change. Hey, people bought the paper with "coins." How often do you make a purchase with just coins any more? We'd leave tips in restaurants with "coins."
I remember the adjustment to the new assumption that you would tip with paper bills. It felt odd at first. Also felt like I was separating myself from too much of my money. And if you thought I was disturbed in that regard, think of my late father! He was the youngest of five boys growing up in the Great Depression. Graduated from high school (Glenwood) in 1934. John Dillinger times. Tip with paper bills? Would have seemed very foreign to him. Maybe some people thought tipping itself was foreign to him! Well, not quite that bad.
I remember a Morris businessman who occasionally joined me for breakfast at Don's Cafe, who left a coin tip long after the practice had been abandoned due to inflation. Quaint. In his mind he was still being generous. Takes time for some people to adjust, move forward. As with me adopting debit cards and electronic bill-pay. My goodness, what might be coming down the road?
Well, one thing that seems likely is higher prices. And now interest rates have been pushed up. So this is reportedly causing stress. Time to buy gold? Just kidding. Ah, those "gold bugs."
Not a knockout punch
Seems that so many of us just absorb inflation as if we have a secret money printer in the basement or something. People skate along with credit cards. But certainly a day of reckoning comes along, doesn't it? Will people pay steadily more for this product called a newspaper? Will they pay more even with the amount of service being scaled back due to the ravages imposed on the industry by the Internet?
Whatever service is provided by the paper, can it not be duplicated by the world of online? I could have asked this question a dozen years ago. We haven't made as much progress with the transition as I would have expected. No, no.
I see the weekly Morris paper at our public library. I remember when color photos were a brand new novelty. Was a thrill to merely see them at the start. Total norm now. Maybe the main service of the Morris paper now is the injection of feel-good positive morale each week, positive coverage of nearly everything, puffy pieces on kids and others - mostly kids - who appear to be accomplishing so much, getting awards. We have always had young people getting special recognition. There are always things to trumpet like new businesses, dynamic people doing dynamic things. But it's all packaged as weekly "news."
I could joke that it gives me an inferiority complex, as one who is largely a "face in the crowd," about whom the old Thoreau quote applies: "The majority of people lead lives of quiet desperation."
A preponderance of us live lives that will never put us in the spotlight for the newspaper. But we seek out the newspaper to notice which people are, which people rate, which organizations rate. Most of us get through our daily obligations in a pedestrian if not desperate way. How many of us are really ready to absorb a price increase for the paper?
Does it dawn on you?
In theory the Morris paper could do so much more. It would only have to use its website more. It's right in front of their nose. Their website. It's right in front of all of our noses, given that Internet access is basically a given for all. A dozen years ago maybe that wasn't the case. People once felt stressful competition to get access to a public library computer! Those times are now faded. In my occasional trips to our library, I sense no stress in getting access to one of the six computer stations. The only thing I need these for now is when I need to print something (like a receipt).
Does anyone bother giving the Morris paper a hard time over its mere token website? I wonder how the publisher would respond to concerns about this. Or is Morris just too apathetic to mount concerns at all? That is always a possibility.
The Morris newspaper website has a "sports" link. What an easily available resource. Just click and skip through the headlines. Would cost the paper nothing to put valuable and timely items there. You should know that some newspapers do avail themselves of this. Morris is not the model. However, the Morris paper does something that adds insult to injury, really truly. Have you noticed this or thought about it? Well, maybe not. I am prodding you. I glance over the links/headlines on "sports" and it seems nearly 100 percent UMM.
A large majority of the UMM athletes are not from this area. Furthermore - and this is most important - UMM has its own website that satisfies 100 percent of the needs of those following UMM sports. And that is terrific.
You needn't have any special brainpower to know what's going on. The paper fears that if it provided reasonably dynamic, timely coverage of Tiger sports on the site, people would feel less of a need to buy the weekly print product. When a Tiger team plays on a Tuesday, when might we expect to see coverage in the print product? Well, answer is easily ascertained.
I know of a former Morris school administrator who would vehemently object to waiting so long to see this coverage. He would lose his temper, which incidentally I would not think was cool. And there sits the website with all of its potential. "Buy the paper." And now prices are going up according to the notice I saw in the current edition.
Well, prices are climbing up for everything, right? The question is, to what extent can we all absorb this? Will we start cutting things out, like the paper? Let's spare ourselves this weekly showering of articles/photos that show all the brilliant people and kids climbing the ladder with their success. Leave me alone. Leave me to my struggles of just presenting myself as a normal person.
The Morris paper adheres to Garrison Keillor: "All of our kids are above average." Would seem rather implausible. But the paper comes on strong with positivity. (How about a "review" of the recent school musical? Someone could write that "a lot of the singing was terrible.")
The grit
Reality for a lot of us is not puffy white clouds. We wrestle with the vicissitudes of day-to-day living. Look at all the people entering/exiting Willie's at any given time. They are sticking to the nuts and bolts of daily living.
It is monumentally disappointing that the radio station website has lost so much ground, so much quality. First Marshall Hoffman leaves. Now it's Brett Miller having left too, and his work was so promising for keeping up with MACA Tiger sports. Gone with the wind. Maybe the station has concluded that there's little monetary potential with the website.
But here's the deal: the sports parents and more broadly the school parents - not to mention many other people - have a need for reasonably timely updates on school doings like sports. The YouTube geniuses have offered so much - a bonanza - but we could use a little more. It will be a long winter for yours truly if I cannot find a media outlet that provides reasonably timely sports results with some details and stats.
We used to get a fair amount of this from the Willmar paper. That asset is now basically gone for us. Is it possible we are just sinking as a community? If you think the Morris paper should be doing its work better, you should talk to them, apply pressure to them. If not, then it's an ossified situation. Life just plods on, we'll just pay more. Indeed, some people just "throw money around" these days, in ways that would have been unheard of in a previous time. My dad could weigh in.
Addendum: Some big shot on Yahoo! News today advised on how people waste so much money. He talks about coffee from specialty places. We could make our own coffee at home, he argues. Well of course we could. He talked about professional people who buy lunch downtown but who could bring a lunch from home instead. The guy giving advice is probably well-to-do. He is trying to advise people who are not ignorant, who really understand what they are doing, and they want the things that they are paying for. One solution might be to reduce the gap between rich and poor! But oh my God, the big shot would find that anathema to every bone in his body! He feels threatened. He thinks the regular folks just need to "economize." Well, he can go sit under a cow.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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