Perhaps I was just one of those children who sadly grew up with an insufficient imagination.But when I look at eBay to see how the bidding is going on a cereal flake shaped like the state of Illinois, I shake my head in amazement because all I see is a corn flake.
THE NOTION THAT bidding was at $200,500 (as of the first minute of Tuesday) to buy a nugget of food that, by now, is so stale as to be inedible strikes me as ridiculous.
What is our society coming to that people are willing to throw away perfectly good money to buy a cereal flake. If I wanted a flake that badly, I would go out to my local supermarket and buy a box of Corn Flakes for $3.59.
The odds are overwhelmingly good that I could find at least one flake (if not several) in the box that would come just as close to resembling Illinois as this flake allegedly does.
Part of my problem with this so-called news story is that it is just so blatantly pointless. Even if the cereal flake does resemble Illinois (and it doesn’t), who cares? It isn’t a terribly significant story. Nor is it particularly interesting.
TWO WOMEN FROM Virginia found a cereal flake in their box of corn flakes that they want to believe is some sort of vision. Of what, we don’t know. No one has said yet what, if anything, it is supposed to mean.
This is just the kind of trivia that takes up television airtime and newspaper space from issues of more significance.
I wish I could take a whack at a particular news organization for wasting time and space on this story. But the Illinois cereal flake is a perfect example of what is wrong with the news business these days – an over-reliance on the (ugh) Associated Press.
It was the (ugh) AP that picked up on reports out of Virginia that local people were making their absurd claim. That caused it to get spread across the country, and probably around the world.
WHILE OTHER PARTS of the world see the Virgin Mary in newly washed windows or the Virgin of Guadalupe burned into the surface of tortillas, we see Illinois in a cornflake.
Personally, I couldn’t help but notice that a newspaper in neighboring Indiana – the Times, based in Munster – put the story on their front page, with a full-color photograph of the cornflake that allegedly gives us an Illinois vision.
That probably means we have a batch of Hoosiers laughing at us now, wondering why our state would turn up in a cornflake. Now if we were to get a vision of the state of Indiana, it would probably turn up in the exhaust fumes emanating from racecars at the Indianapolis 500.
Now that would be a vision worth seeing, although the smell of so much exhaust would likely smell something fierce.
I COULDN’T HELP but think back to that moment three years ago when residents of a northwest side neighborhood along the Kennedy Expressway noticed something unusual about a salt stain on the concrete walls of an underpass.
To them, the image looked like the Virgin Mary in her shroud, taking a break from appearing on tortillas across Mexico to bless us Chicagoans with her image.
I remember the way that wall became an informal shrine, with devout Catholics setting up religious candles and flowers and more artistic renditions of the blessed virgin – for those of us who could not see the image for ourselves.
It’s a good thing those paintings were there, or else I never would have been able to figure out how anyone could possibly think the oval salt stain could resemble the Virgin Mary.
THE BEST I can come up with for an answer to this great visions question is that some people just want to believe. It doesn’t matter what, but they want to.
The religiously devout want to think that the sighting of the Virgin Mary is evidence that a miracle is about to happen, or that we are blessed, or maybe that we should take the time to watch our surroundings so as to reduce the chances of something bad happening.
It’s almost like the Rorschach tests – those ink blots that different people see different images in, and what you see says something about our individual personalities.
SO WHAT DOES it say that we now have a vision of the state of Illinois turning up in a corn flakes box?
Does this mean that the Land of Lincoln is destined to be the home of the next president of the United States? Personally, I’d have been more impressed if someone had produced a corn flake in the shape of Barack Obama’s head – ears and all.
That would be a sign worth seeing. And what does it say about my personality that the first thought I had about an Illinois vision was to associate it with Obama?
LIKELY, IT MEANS I’m paying too much attention to this year’s presidential primary season – particularly since it has already come and gone here in Illinois (but there’s always the chance that the candidates will come to the portion of the Chicago-area that falls in Indiana – their primary is May 6).
But my final thought upon seeing the alleged Illinois vision in a cereal flake is to start feeling a rumbling in my stomach. Perhaps I’ll get a bowl of cereal.
Just not corn flakes. There’s no way I’d pay that much money for a flake, especially since I could easily envision it falling on the floor and getting stepped on – thereby reducing that thousands-of-dollars purchase to corn dust within seconds.
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EDITOR’S NOTES: One can check out the eBay auction (http://cgi.ebay.com/The-Great-Illinois-Corn-Flake_W0QQitemZ110233337338QQihZ001QQcategoryZ1467QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem) for themselves, just in case they think I’m exaggerating the amount of money that someone is willing to pay for an alleged vision of Illinois.
A news blast from the past – the Virgin Mary spent a summer living in a Kennedy Expressway (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/20/national/main689630.shtml) underpass in Chicago.
Documentation can be found here (http://members.aol.com/bjw1106/marian.htm) about the many past visions around the world of the Virgin Mary.
For people who are willing to spend so much money for a single corn flake, here are a few more cereal-related items (http://www.kelloggstore.com/Collectables.aspx) one could purchase. And no, Kellogg Co. did NOT pay me anything for this promotional plug.
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