On the top end, my 2024 wish list reads like many others — world peace, proper migrant housing, reconciliation between America’s left and right wings, Chicago political reforms, cancer and dementia treatment breakthroughs.
Less seriously, though, I personally submit the following hoped-for developments. Some sound quirky, but then many current cultural norms were initially received with scorn or amusement. Consider the TV remote control, drive-thru window and electric toothbrush.
- An app that retrieves unread email transmissions you’d like to disappear or edit. Who among the computer literate hasn’t regretted firing off an angry or hastily written note?
- A return to the societal standard that had us speaking little about religion and politics. Or failing that, liberal and conservative seating sections in restaurants. This would limit overhearing of nearby conversations you object to, and indigestion gas.
- Processed food packages that ping in the back of the refrigerator when they reach the freshness date.
- Biodegradable outdoor holiday decorations that disintegrate after a month, sparing homeowners the trouble of taking them down.
- In our nation on wheels, technology to disconnect cellphone calls within vehicles in motion. And built into every self-driving car, an additional cluster of automotive “selfies:” self-activating turn signals, self-cleaning interiors, self-repairing exterior dings and self-rotating tires.
Happy motoring in ‘24.
Tom Gregg, Niles
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Women have special powers
The headline on Gene Lyons’ 12/23/23 column is “Texas abortion case defies logic, compassion.” Lyons says he “cannot comprehend the thinking of Texas Republican officials” who forced Kate Cox, the 31-year-old mother of two kids, to flee the state in order to have an abortion to save her own life and preserve her ability to have more children. Of course, that makes no logical sense.
Yet, later in that same column, Lyons notes that for religious authoritarians, “shaming and controlling women’s sexuality is always Job No. 1 for the holiest among us.” And there’s the “logic,” such as it is.
And it has likely been so for millennia. Let’s remember the Salem witch trials. Women who were thought to have “special powers” were feared, so they were ultimately killed.
My theory has long been that men have always feared women, precisely because women indeed have “special powers:” namely, the power to bring life into the world. Men can only get life started, and then they’re biologically no longer needed.
So, some men (read: GOP men), possibly out of envious rage, have decided if they can’t have women’s “special powers,” they (GOP men) can at least control women’s reproductive rights.
This explanation may seem facile and overly simplified, but it makes a lot of sense to me. What do you think?
Bob Chimis, Elmwood Park
