“Sudden change, even if it is for the good, is
disruptive.” --Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister, Malaysia
It’s the place where I’ve met many a blind date, a place to
nervously page through newspapers and magazines as I wait for a mystery woman
to show up. It’s the place to meet my Goddaughter for dinner, as I take the “T”
in from the ‘burbs and she strolls over from the Yard. It’s the place I rarely
shop anymore but a place whose presence, sure and steady, strong and true,
right in the heart of Cambridge’s Harvard Square…it’s a place that I will miss
when it closes up shop at the end of next month.
It’s Out of Town News, a purveyor of all things
journalistic: newspaper broad sheets and tabloids from all over the United
States and the world, a seller of hundreds of magazines, everything from
Popular Mechanics to Playboy. The place to buy a map if you are a tourist,
cigarettes if you are smoker, or a Coke to slake your thirst on a hot summer
day.
First built as a subway entrance in 1927, in 1954 it opened
its narrow doors for business in a squat brown building that sits at the
busiest intersection in the square. For sixty-five years it’s sold the news,
from near and far. Like New York City’s Grand Central Station clock, Out of
Town News is a place that most everyone knows, is easily recognizable and an
absolute perfect landmark to meet.
But on October 31st, unless some last-minute Halloween
miracle saves this venerated institution, it will go away, the building staying,
but the business shuttered for good. It wasn’t a zoning problem that closed Out
of Town News, nor sky high rent. Cambridge, which owns the building, is
planning to renovate that piece of valuable real estate and the current owner
of the store has said he will not renew the lease.
Yet beyond this seemingly simple business decision, what
really killed Out of Town News is me, and you, and millions of other folks who
still consume the news, read the news, follow the news but now do so through
our screens. Who needs actual physical containers for the news—made of paper
and ink--when with a tap on a smartphone or computer mouse we can get the news
and so much faster and more up to date and all so conveniently?
The fancy term for this type of social shift is “disruptive
innovation”. Though the entrepreneurs who create and exploit such innovation in
2019—think Amazon, Uber, or Google—might imagine they are the pioneers of such
disruption, the truth is that disruptive change has been going on forever. It’s
hard baked into the human condition. God gave us brains to think and so we do
just that and we constantly build upon the innovation and creations of the past
to move into tomorrow.
So, the horse and buggy were killed by the car. The telegram
was killed by the telephone. The movies killed burlesque and then TV was
supposed to kill the movies but now Netflix just might kill both the movies and
cable TV. Facebook and other social media are radically reshaping how community
is formed and so even the place I work, a church, a 2,000 plus year old institution—we
are being radically disrupted too.
I will miss Out of Town News. Miss the visceral feel of the
printed page as I flip through a magazine or newspaper. I still miss the black
ink that used to stain my hands as a newspaper boy in Springfield,
Massachusetts so, so long ago.
But the economy, all of life: it does not run on nostalgia,
on looking backwards, on staying put. We cannot return to an era when America
was supposedly “great” because that is not the way that time or the human
experience works. We humans are a restless lot, created by a God who gives us
the power to think, to change, to grow, to innovate and to reach for the
stars.
Along that path, as we shift from one way of doing things to
another, it can be hard to bid farewell to the familiar and the comfortable and
the known. But the truth is that innovation and disruption happen, and not just
because some vague outside force wrenches us into the future.
Disruption happens because of us. Factories in the United
States close not just because of corporate greed. They close because we demand
cheaper consumer goods. Clothes that cost as little as possible. Appliances so
inexpensive that when they break, we just throw them away. We demand the news:
not a day late, not on a 24-hour timer, but now. RIGHT NOW!
We don’t buy the news at Out of Town News anymore.
And that’s a shame. And that’s reality. And that’s good and
that’s bad and that’s the way this amazing world works. As to a new place to
meet my blind dates: any suggestions?
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