RIVER CITY JOURNAL: EVEN IN A SMALL TOWN, PROGRESS WILL COME

There was some shocking news in your hometown paper last week. Your hometown paper is a wonderful newspaper, chock full of news from Turkey Creek by Mag Hovis and the latest arguments at the courthouse and all the arrests for being drunk and disorderly.

Your hometown is a pretty small town. Always has been. Probably always will be. There are several churches, a few bars, a few stores, a couple of factories and a pretty good school system. But it is still a small town.

That is, it was a small town until last week's edition of the hometown paper arrived. A front-page story announced, quite officially, that the town is about to get its first stoplight.

This may not seem like anything of importance to you, kind readers. But it is a sign of the kind of change you thought would never come to your hometown.

For years when someone has asked you where you were from, you would tell them you were from a really small town in the Ozarks. Folks who aren't from a really small town tend to be a little bit snobbish, particularly if you are from a small town and the Ozarks too. So these uppity people would say something like, "So, what do you do for fun in this really small town? Watch the stoplight turn red."

It has always been a source of great pride that you would respond -- in a very even voice, of course -- that you have never watched a stoplight turn red for fun, because your town is too small to have a stoplight.

Golly, your town is so small it doesn't even have all that many stop signs, and there are quite a few places where one street crosses another, although one of the streets is the same street in most cases.

Now, your hometown newspaper says, progress has brought the city fathers to the brink of a stoplight. The traffic signal would be, as you understand it, a flashing red light that would require motorists to stop on Main Street and allow motorists on side streets to turn onto or cross Main Street.

Now isn't that the cat's meow.

The mayor says the stoplight is a sign of growth and prosperity, but that is what the mayor says about everything he announces. That is what mayors do, you know.

You can remember when motorists in your hometown were thoughtful and courteous -- so alert to the well-being of their friends and neighbors that they would come to a dead stop on Main Street to allow someone to turn or cross for no good reason other than it was the decent thing to do.

Well, that is progress for you. Now neighborliness has to be regulated by a flashing red light.

As far as you are concerned, the future of your hometown will grow dimmer in direct proportion to the brightness of traffic signals that will spring up all over the place. Before you know it there will be flashing lights at street corners that never saw the likes of a stop sign. A good ditch for drainage was, until progress came along, enough to slow traffic to a respectably safe speed.

What you would rather see your hometown do is adopt the you-go-first rule of small-town driving. Whenever you come to an intersection and another motorist wants to turn or cross, you just stop, tip your hat and make that waving motion with your hand that is the international small-town signal for "You go first. I'll just wait until all this congestion clears out."

Wait a minute. Does anybody tip their hats anymore? There is another sign of progress in the parade of human development.

Your hometown is going to get a traffic signal whether you like it or not. Next thing you know they will be having dances on Sundays and folks will start keeping beer in their refrigerators even when the preacher comes to visit and juvenile delinquents will raise all kind of heck.

You can't stop progress.

R. Joe Sullivan is editor of the Southeast Missourian.