Hauling My Groceries up onto My Soapbox

This morning at the neighborhood Jewel, I found myself sandwiched between a long line of people behind me, and a wall of incompetence in front. While the cashier spent ten minutes working with the customer ahead of me trying to get her grocery card to work, I zoned out to clips of John Stewart on the TV. It actually took me a few minutes before I realized what I was doing: I was watching television in the grocery store checkout line. I looked around. Sure enough, there were TVs in all the checkout lines. (I never noticed it before because I’m one of those impatient types who relies on self-checkout.)

Then I got to thinking about what it says about us as a society, that we need televisions at the checkout counter. It used to be enough just to pick up a magazine and flip through it while you waited, but not anymore. Now we need to have news and entertainment fed to us with little to no effort on our parts, if we have to wait more than two seconds in a line.

They installed televisions at some of the El stops, too. I remember when they first put them in at the Clark/Lake stop in May. I was waiting for the green line after work and I noticed the new flat screen TV sets, still partially-wrapped in protective plastic. The first thing that flashed into my head was the billions of dollars the CTA is in debt. They’d raised our travel fees a few months earlier. And here I thought that rate hike was helping to keep people employed, and to perform maintenance on trains and buses!

In these days of PDAs and iPhones, I guess I just find it incredible that television sets are popping up all over the place. It’s such overkill and overload. Do we really need to have information and entertainment (not to mention marketing) spoon-fed to us every second we’re not working? Goodness knows, I’m on my computer all the time, at work and at home (and if I had an iPhone it would be half of the rest of the time, too), so I’m not excusing myself. But I don’t think it’s healthy that I feel the constant need to be connected to technology this way. And I think that having time just to be, to think, and to observe the real, physical world around me is invaluable. If you put a TV in front of my face, I'll probably watch it. And maybe I'll learn something new, but I'm pretty sure the people getting the most benefit out of this are the ones advertising their products in the endless strings of commercials.

You know, I’m grateful that Chicago is still a reading city. On the El, you’ll see a good number of people glued to a book the entire commute to work. Part of me actually misses the 25-minute El ride I used to have from Uptown, because the couple of stops I've got now only provide enough time to just get engrossed and then you’re stepping off again. Reading is relaxing, and it’s an escape. I just hope that we’re not going to become so obsessed with technology and fast facts that this reading culture dies (and by "reading," I mean something beyond an 8th grade reading level, which, by the way, is the target reading level for ecommerce sites). And I don't care if that makes me old-fashioned.