I’m drawing up plans to construct an outrage meter.  Granted, I’ve never seen one nor even heard of one before, but why should that stop me? This is what happens when one polar vortex after another rolls in, dropping temperatures into the single digits or lower. Normally sane, even-keeled individuals (I count myself amongst them, but don’t ask my family), trapped indoors day after day while trying to maintain body temperature, go off the deep end and end up envisioning impossibly complicated endeavors.

My outrage meter is one such project. I imagine it as a freestanding sign on which I project my progressive outrage at a world run amok with social injustice, income inequality, empathy deficit, and unnecessary hunger and violence.  I see it as my own visual bully pulpit. I’ve pledged to myself that no outrage will be spared—be it local, national, or international.

I expect my outrage meter to inspire full-throated pushback here in the historic, upstate New York village in which I live. First, there’s the issue of my deviance from the (mostly) conservative politics of my neighbors. Second, the meter, which will be an unprecedented structure in the historic district in which I reside, will be subject to review for historic appropriateness. (And as those of you who have dealt with historic commissions know, the pace of historic review is certain to threaten the projected completion of my outrage meter before the first thaw.)

Pragmatist that I am, I know I’ll have to design my meter with a deft hand, employing subtlety and even a bit of subterfuge. I expect to forgo a flashy LED display and compromise on the shut-off hour. I expect I’ll be asked to turn off the lighting on the outrage meter no later than 9:00 pm, even though I plan to make an impassioned case that outrage never sleeps. Size will be determined by precise calculations based on the expanse of my home’s façade, as per historic standards. To satisfy the local historic commission I’ll need to submit dimensional drawings showing the changing display of outrages appropriately sized and, I expect, hand-lettered in elegant, serif fonts painted in muted tones of the most costly buttermilk paint. The fonts will be expected, of course, to reference the handful of extant locally produced, historic broadsides (of which era will surely be up for ad nauseam debate).

Besides the manner in which outrages will be displayed, I expect the materials used to construct the backing surfaces to be controversial as well. I predict that my local historic commission will require that I source late-18th or early-19^th century repurposed, local, hand-cut wood lathing matching in dimensions, thickness, and 100-year faded coloration the strips of lathing hiding behind the plastered walls in my house; patina-embellished antique iron hardware for supports; and lighting fixtures deemed historically correct (preferably, I suspect, nothing less than open-flame, whale-oil carriage lamps). Ideally, the outrage meter would be installed on my front lawn with historically appropriate setbacks from the street.

Documenting that my outrage meter meets the commission’s standards for historic precedent might prove challenging—if not impossible. Hopefully, since to my knowledge no one seems to have thought of constructing outrage meters in the 18th or 19th centuries, the commission might show leniency and give me a bye on historic documentation.

I’m a dreamer but I’m also a realist. I expect design and construction to cost me a large chunk of change. Costs will most likely soar when the commission rejects my ad-hoc design and instead requires the hiring of a recognized team of faux-historic, outrage-meter architects.

(Ignoring my pleas for mercy, I predict I’ll be forced to fly in the only architects in the U.S. who specialize in outrage meters. They’ll make their way north from either the Deep South or Texas, two areas of the country where they’ve been able to make a decent living since Obama took office.)

I’ll expect to pay my architectural team royally to draw up schematics, present them, and then revise them, perhaps a few dozen times over, depending on the ensuing uncertainty of how many shifts in debate might unfold over such a delicate and unprecedented request. Seasons will go by as members of the commission disappear for months on end searching dusty archives for historic precedents and debating amongst themselves the appropriateness of size, materials, and font choice.

My meter might be a never-before-seen feature in the landscape of my sleepy village, but outrage itself certainly is not. I may not always share the same outrage with my neighbors, but I know that all of us feel the emotion with the same strength and fervency. I know this because I have attended many a local community meeting where the issues at hand stir up primal emotions not seen since the end of the Pleistocene era.

I predict that some of those same neighbors who may object at first to my outrage meter will end up admiring the audaciousness of the project. They might even be inspired to construct a meter of their own. I can see it now: Outrage meters cropping up on lawns like dandelions in spring. No topic of outrage would ever again find itself neglected nor lacking for public debate. Outdoor wood burners, installations of sewer systems, water pollution, fracking, construction of industrial-waste facilities, pesticide use, military engagement, health care, Social Security benefits, corrupt politicians, unequal taxation, gun regulation—all might, at long last, have their full airing out here in the sun.

The post Blueprint for an “outrage meter” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Recently I met a guy named Otto Leuschel.  Otto’s got a fascinating story to tell about his journey from vice-president of the northeastern division of Whole Foods to becoming “your local grocer on Main Street.” Otto is just one of many small-business owners who are betting that enough of us are fed up with the big-box era that we’ll choose to forgo the mind-numbing experience of football-field–sized selling floors and take our dollars and pennies, and spend them in support of our local shops.

Four years ago, Otto Leuschel landed in tiny Germantown (population less than 2,000), a down-on-its-heels, trying-to-pull-itself-back-up village about two hours north of New York City. Since then, Otto’s been putting in fifty-hour work weeks and draining his savings, betting that his down-home grocery store, Otto’s Market, and Germantown Variety, his new variety store just across the street, will fit the bill for people who are tired of navigating the endless aisles of the big boxes to find a jar of mayonnaise, a spool of thread, or a ball of twine.

Otto’s business model is old, yet new. It embraces local producers and quality, competitively priced, everyday goods made in the U.S.A. Otto’s your man if you want to meet the quintessential salesperson who exudes confidence in his brand.  He believes that our communities will be better places when they’re bustling with the vibrancy and personal connections that are the by-product of small, owner-operated shops.

Still, as a no-nonsense, bottom-line kind of guy, Leuschel concedes that the doubters, the naysayers, and, of course, the corporate bigwigs are trying their best to convince us that the little guy (metaphorically speaking, because Otto is a big guy) long ago lost the battle.  Before buying into the self-serving gloom and doom and assigning owner-operated shops a plot in the land of nostalgia, Otto recommends we take a hard look at a bit of history—specifically, the story of corporate giant Sears, Roebuck & Co.—and then decide for ourselves if today’s big-box giants are unstoppable.

 For almost a century, Sears, Roebuck seemed untouchable

Is Otto right?  Does the present replicate the past?  It certainly seems so. Sears, Roebuck was, after all, the granddaddy of the mail orders and big boxes. Sears was the Walmart and Amazon of its time rolled into one. In 1888, when founder Richard Warren Sears came up with the idea of delivering merchandise directly to people’s homes and printed and distributed his first catalog, retail warfare erupted almost immediately.

After all, at the time Sears’ mail-order pricing undercut the pricing of rural shopkeepers. (Sound familiar?) Not surprisingly, local shopkeepers were outraged. The outrage was so intense that rural newspapers joined the fray and refused to carry Sears’ ads. And that wasn’t the end of it. Shop owners even enlisted children and handed out free movie passes, and sometimes a ten-cent bribe, for every Sears catalog they turned in. Some communities went even further and staged bonfires that sent reams of sewing-machine and bicycle ads up in smoke.

You see, the Ottos of those days and the communities they served understood that Sears, Roebuck was a threat, not only to their individual livelihoods, but also to traditional community bonds.

And where is Sears today?  The story hasn’t ended happily. In the last year alone, the once-dominant retail giant has shuttered 172 stores.

Big boxes have diminished our sense of community

What about our sense of community today? For those of us who live outside the largest urban centers, the big-box model has removed the search for our daily necessities from the centers of our communities to the perimeters.  The social consequences have been devastating. When we drive to the magnet Walmart or Target or Lowe’s, we forfeit the daily interactions with our neighbors that used to be the norm.  For generations, personal relationships and community identity were forged, as individuals pushed open the doors of small shops and encountered their neighbors inside.

Those kinds of community connections were built on the accumulation of small familiarities. The face behind the counter was on a first-name basis with every customer and their dog. He/she knew what kind of milk the regulars drank, what newspapers they read, their favorite ice cream flavors.  Shop owners knew what kinds of gifts their customers bought for special occasions. Neighbors understood just enough about each other’s beliefs and political persuasions that they instinctively honed in on which gossipy tidbit or news item they could safely talk about, or which to avoid at all costs. Local concerns and important community decisions were shared and hashed out ad nauseam while waiting for the butcher to wrap a cut of meat.

The assumption is that those days and those relationships are a thing of the past, and that the way we pursue the purchase of our day-to-day necessities has been channeled, now and forever, into the depersonalized, data-tracked shopping universe.

 The numbers tell one story, but our desires tell another

It’s true that by looking solely at the numbers, you’d have to conclude that the  neighborhood shop is becoming as extinct as nightly sit-down dinners or week nights without homework.  After all, employees of a single family—yes, that would be the Waltons—unlock the automated doors of more than 4,600 retail outlets. The Walton empire alone employs more than 1.4 million people in towns and cities across the U.S.

In a recent New York Times article, Walmart spokesperson Brooke Buchanan proudly underscored her employer’s market dominance when she declared that every month, more than 60 percent of Americans shop at Walmart locations. That’s a big chunk of us out there, searching for the lowest prices on everything we need, and lots we don’t.

On the other hand, if you take a close look at the small towns and villages of New York’s Hudson Valley—the place I call home—you’ll find a very different narrative. Stubborn, individualistic entrepreneurs like Otto Leuschel have become the primary drivers of economic revitalization in historic towns and villages that hold pride of place across the northeastern landscape. It seems these intrepid businesspeople—and those who support them and seek out the charm and interpersonal relationships their businesses foster—just didn’t get the memo.  And if they did, they’ve chosen to tear it up and ignore it in their pursuit of a retro business model and a model of community identity that’s worked pretty darned well for generations.

So, if you want to see firsthand how the match-up between corporate big boxes and the small entrepreneur is playing out, seek out the owner-operated shops in small towns and villages in your neck of the woods, or come to mine or Otto Leuschel’s. Experience firsthand what your grandparents took for granted, and then decide what kind of community you’d prefer to live in. Then take the next step, and put your money where your desire is.

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