A little out of character for me/this blog, but I saw this being shared on Facebook today:
Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.
The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days." The young clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment f or future generations."
She 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 truly recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.
Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that we reused for numerous things, most memorable besides household garbage bags, was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our schoolbooks. This was to ensure that public property, (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribbling's. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags. But too bad we didn't do the green thing back then.
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 throwaway kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young 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 wadded up old newspapers 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 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger 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.
Okay look, so, I need to be a downer here.
These are all good and laudable practices.
But let's be real careful with our nostalgia here.
Washing our diapers by hand isn't going to bring back the ice caps. Or frogs.
Getting overly-nostalgic about a rose-tinted "good old days", handily absent a specific time period, is one of my biggest pet peeves. It's a wonderful way of subtly blaming the victim.
And the victim is us, my friends.
In general, I am very optimistic about the future; that is to say, I think this is overall the best time to be alive, and it's likely to get better. That said:
Climate change is real and huge and we're only going to see it more. Massive pollution, poor land use, and eradication of biodiversity are not going away. The looting and plundering of our financial system and economy, the glaring loss of equality and opportunity for 99% of Americans, the expensive-to-rectify conversion of our cities into glorified automobile exchanges instead of vibrant public spaces--these are real and long-term problems that were all set up in the "good old days". The failure to address most of these issues in any timely or meaningful way is largely due to people in power who were raised in and try to emulate "the good old days".
When we uncritically perpetuate the myth of a golden age we've all fallen from (apparently the '50s, which--if that doesn't give you pause...read a book, people), we not only blame the present (or at least the very recent past) for problems that go back much further, we risk ignoring the attendant issues (sexism & racism to an extent that seems almost surreal today springs to mind, not that those battles are done), the extent to which these technologies were not romantic and fun, but back-breaking and time-consuming, and, much larger, how this entire system was enabled by and led to our current state of affairs: coasting on an affluence at least partially derived from rampant exploitation of the environment, embracing a military/industrial/capitalist combo that yielded a lot of changes in quality of life, but also resulted in all these environmental and social problems.
Should we an embrace less wasteful, more personal technologies in our lives? Absolutely. But the way forward, unsurprisingly, is not back. We're going to need new solutions to deal with the legacy of environmental damage left to us by "the good old days". There's no justice possible for these kinds of distributed, cross-generational harms, and there's only so much use in being angry about things done by society at large, in the past--but think twice before you buy too heavily into this kind of argument about how good and green we were "back then".
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