Posted on 10/24/2011 8:44:55 AM PDT by granite
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?
Back when I was a kid we would fund our surf trips by collecting bottles to gas up the Bug.
Essentially, each generation uses the tools available to them, to make life easier. People can always go back to doing what they did in the old days, if they wanted to.
Exactly. If you could go back to your childhood knowing what you know now, you wouldn’t want to live like that. Things weren’t necessarily better then (maybe in some ways yes); our perspective of them is distorted by nostalgia.
I don’t think I’d want to go back to the pre-Internet days where looking up information required spending hours in a library searching for books that likely were outdated anyway. Childhood memories are nice, but in the end be thankful that getting things done is so much easier now.
“You should stick to cashiering and quit promoting your earth worshiping religion!”
I have been talking to my wife/kids about our lives. I would rather be alive today then to be a kazillionaire even 100 years ago. We live better than kings did...and aren’t even thankful because we think it is our ‘right’...and now many demand more/better because it is their ‘right’ at our expense...and I stop here before I get mad...
I’m right with ya. As a kid, my girlfriend and I would pull a wagon around our town - we’d sometimes go blocks. We’d ask people if they had any old bottles they never returned. Many people - especially the elderly - just didn’t have the motivation to do it. They often gladly gave them to us. Meanwhile, we also had maybe one person in all those years scream at us and call us beggars... ha ha...we still laugh about that. We funded a lot of little expeditions and candy runs to the local candy store!
Yeah, really. A trailer-park resident lives better than John D. Rockefeller did in a lot of ways.
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