A lot of small towns dried up and blew away afterall the merchants left town for shopping malls on the outskirts. The trendwasn’t any healthier for urban areas. Large suburban malls helped killdowntowns in major cities all over America.
That’s why it was so ironic when suburban shoppingmalls began recreating themselves to pretend to be nostalgic small townscomplete with town squares and bandstands.
Even in Wisconsinwhere the winters are brutal, enclosed malls began knocking down walls andbuilding clusters of separate shops with outdoor access to recreate 1950ssmall-town life, only without the alcoholism and incest.
The best example in the Milwaukeearea is Bayshore Town Center.It’s one of those formerly enclosed malls located in Glendale, a bedroom suburb that never reallyhad any town before.
Because I really did grow up in a 1950s small town,I have been amused to see what shopping center developers consider a perfectsmall town from our past.
Expensive condos are built above the shops to giveseniors with lots of disposable income instant access to places to dispose ofit.
My mother raised four boys by herself working atminimum-wage jobs in a small town. We often lived in small apartments overstores downtown. It was never considered prime real estate.
Maybe it’s because I was one, but I also distinctlyremember small towns having kids.
The week after Christmas, Bayshore Town Center took steps to makesure it doesn’t have that problem.
Before we deal with the issue of Bayshore banningyoung people, we should consider the first clause in that sentence: “The weekafter Christmas.”
We have been told repeatedly it is the Christmasshopping season that provides retailers with the overwhelming majority of theirprofits for the entire year. So it was immediately after Bayshore had taken asmuch money as it could from teenage shoppers that management announced a newpolicy banning anyone under 18 from the mallexcuse me, townafter 3 p.m. onFridays and Saturdays unless he or she was accompanied by a parent or guardian.
Expecting Discrimination
In our history, we know that laws banning peoplefrom towns after sundown were frequently based on race.
There is little doubt there is a racial element tothe curfews against young people that recently have been adopted by someshopping centers.
But we should be concerned about broad-brushdiscrimination against all kids, whether it’s because they’re black or brown orsimply because they’re young.
The fact is we’re raising a generation of youngpeople to expect discrimination in America.
Even before private shopping centers realized theycould legally discriminate against young people, we began teaching children inschool not to expect to have any rights.
The “War on Drugs” chipped away at the rights of allof us, but we used it in our schools to test just how far we could go indestroying traditional civil liberties in this country. “Probable cause” ofwrongdoing completely disappeared as a requirement for stripping students ofrights. Random locker searches, police sweeps using drug-sniffing dogs andmandatory drug tests to participate in sports or extracurricular activitiesbecame standard in many schools.
Some of the techniques tested in our schools forpopulation controlconstant video surveillance as envisioned by George Orwell,for instancehave now moved into general use. Government installation ofcameras to watch our every move continues to spread.
Sometimes schools and government seem to borrow eachother’s worst ideas. The proposal by the GreenfieldSchool District to build “seclusionrooms” for disruptive special-education students could have been inspired by Guantanamo Bay.
Because shopping centers are private property, thereare very few obstacles to them making their own laws, even discriminatory ones,as our courts continue to move to the right.
The overwhelming majority of the adult populationprobably agrees with banning teenagers from malls, believing that young peopletoday are far more threatening than young people in the good old days. (Theymight want to go back and check out BlackboardJungle and some of those hot-rod movies from the 1950s about juveniledelinquency.)
But if shopping malls really are the new towncenters these days, somehow we have to start learning how to live together.
Not only should young people behave in public inways that are respectful of adults, but adults should learn to respect youngpeople as well. Someday, they might even learn to enjoy being around eachother.
