a lot of the stuff I get in chain emails is hopelessly nostalgic...

But this one makes a good point...


The Green Thing

In the line at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.


The woman apologized to him and explained, "We didn't have the green thing back in my day."

The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment."

He was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled.

But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.

But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that old lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana.
In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us.
When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.
Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water.
We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

But we didn't have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service.
We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart ass young person.




I was old enough to remember all of this. But of course back then, I lived in what is now called an "inner ring" suburb. I remember as a kid that I could get any where all over the city by using the bus and rapid transit system.

Now I live in an outer inner ring suburb that is sprawled all out and I need a car to get around. There is no convenient public transit. It was all defended back in the Reagan era.

I need AC to survive and an electrical Oxygen machine to help me breath. But other than that, we try to reuse everything at least once. To the consternation of our neighbors, we don't water the lawn, we just let the rain take care of it. We usually have one can of garbage a week while most of our neighbors have two or three cans.

We compost as well. We have an energy efficient hot water tank, furnace and will replace the AC with a high efficiency unit within the next few weeks. We also plan our shopping trips as best as we can.

Anyway, Green is different in different eras. The cars and the pollution from industry back then more than made up for the pollution saved by the stuff mentioned in the quaint EMail above.

It's hard to be green in the suburbs. But it can be done.

I remember those days too...

It was a very different way of life.

How did we lose our way?

Well, we wanted things to be better and easier, and we didn't think about the consequences...


Recommended.

We wanted cheap appliances, cheap electronic gadgets, cheap clothing, etc.

But, we had no idea at how expensive those cheap things would turn out to be! The loss of our manufacturing base comes to mind.

Well said.

And to distract people from the issue at hand by imposing a generational gap. Odds are this clerk has about as much basis in reality as Ronald Reagan's "welfare queen".

There plenty of ways to point out that perhaps part of the solution to the environmental issues were facing is to re-learn to do without so many modern conveniences. The person who wrote this chain letter decided to do it in a manner not intended to actually get people to do it, but to divide young and old people and distract us all from the issue at hand.

If we combine the practices of the stuff this person spelled out and combine it with the stuff we have discovered, the environment would be in a hell of a better place...

I pity you for being so cynical that you can't find a kernal of truth in what this email has to say.

"If we combine the practices of the stuff this person spelled out and combine it with the stuff we have discovered, the environment would be in a hell of a lot better place..."

That was not the message of this e-mail. The message of this e-mail was... "Hey you young people telling me not to use plastic bags, my lifestyle was way more green than yours back in the day, so shut the fuck up!"

If the author of this e-mail actually cared about the environment they would have used an anecdote that actually conveyed the message you just stated, rather than focusing on dividing old people and young people.

I was using the E-Mail as starting point not as a way to praise it...

And I get the divisive point of the E-Mail, but it did spell out the way I remember living back in the 60's...

I also remember driving over a bridge that had smoke stack factories under the bridge and trying to hold my breath so that I wouldn't breath in the pollution...

I was an odd child.

Stuff tastes way better out of glass than plastic and even if you don't re-use or recycle it, glass is just sand.

I honestly don't think it's an issue of plastic being lighter, either. I think we use plastic because everybody is freakin scared that little Johnny will cut himself with a glass bottle. Honestly people, put a bandage on if that happens.

I've pretty much yet to see one that doesn't drag some silly sanctimonious rant like this one into them one way or another.

I've read and been sent too many of these variations over the years, and the tone is always the same...

To say nothing of the fact that following the astroturfer's logic, a person born a generation before the mytical author would have been much greener, and the Amish are the greenest people in the nation...

toxic waste was also dumped all over with impunity, leaded gas polluted our air, DDT killed lots of birds, no pollution control equipment on anything.....yeah, those were the good old days.

Combining what we know now with the practices of what went on then we could really turn the environment around.

I just started to read the Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler and he was talking about sustainable living and going back to a time when we all lived closer to the environment. It was a curious turn of events that this EMail, and I know, as I stated, it is hopelessly nostalgic, came at the same time I was reading that book.

now. While I understand the "yeah, but" when it comes to nostalgia, what's to prevent us from taking the "good" from the "good old days" and make it work better now?

We all bought dryers, and we all installed dryers, and we then all went out back, cut down our clotheslines, threw them and the clothespins in the burn barrel, set that shit on fire and danced a little jig.

We didn't get away from drying clothes outside because we're lazy. We did it because it's a more efficient use of labor to dry them inside, and because in a lot of cases clothes dried outside aren't as nice as clothes dried inside. I have tried everything I could think of and everything I've read about, and always my line-dried clothes were stiff when I brought them in. Machine-dried clothes are always nice and soft.

Oh yes, I would be amiss to not point out that thanks to that generation not being into the green thing, there is now so much lead in the bed of the Coeur d'Alene River, Spokane River and Coeur d'Alene-Chatcolet Lake system you will never get it out and you should never eat fish you caught there.

Nor do I use fabric softener in the wash.

Now, I may be doing it completely wrong, but when I wash with the best detergent and fabric softener then hang the clothes out to dry, the finished laundry is always more rigid than it is when I put it in the dryer with no softening agent at any stage of the process.

to soften it....and then hang it out.... love the fresh smell, too.

I live in the desert and hang most everything out....dang stuff comes off the line hotter than my dryer!

We used shared payphones on the corners instead of everyone carrying their own.

For you young'uns who have never heard of a party line, in the really old days telephone dial central office switchgear was really expensive...and they passed the expense on to you. If you wanted to save money on your phone bill, you could request a "two party line" (two families sharing the same phone number) or a "four party line" (four families sharing the same phone number). When the phone rang, all four houses would pick up the phone, and the caller would say who he or she wished to speak to. Etiquette demanded you hung up if you weren't the person who got called, but a lot of people didn't, which is how lots of juicy gossip started.

For extra entertainment: If you were on a party line and wanted to call your neighbor, you picked up the phone, dialed your own phone number and immediately hung up. The switchgear took a few seconds to complete setup, and then all the phones on your party line would ring. You'd pick up, your neighbor would pick up (you could pick up into a phone call at any time) and you started talking.

and my parents used cloth diapers. If I have kids, I'll use them. I'm used to picking up dog poop, so really, how bad can it be?

Loved your post, btw.