Published 23/09/2014
For this month’s newsletter I decided I would use an E-mail that I have had sent to me as it appealed to my grandma sense of humour, and I also noted the fact that its content is relevant to our environmental concerns.
ARE YOU GOING GREEN?
Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the much older woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags were no good for the environment.
The woman apologized and explained, “we didn’t have this ‘’green thing” back in my day.”
The young clerk responded, “That is our problem, your generation did not care enough to save our environment for younger generations.”
She was right – our generation didn’t have this “green thing” in our 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, sterilized and refilled , so it could use the same bottles over and over. I believe it is called recycling.
Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags that we re-used for numerous things, most memorable was the use of brown paper bags book covers for our schoolbooks. This was to ensure that the books provided by the school was not defaced by scribbling.
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 2 blocks.
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 220volts. The wind and sun dried the clothes.
Kids got hand –me-downs from the nearest sibling. We had one TV or radio in the house, not one in every room and the TV screen was the size of a handkerchief, we all actually sat together in the lounge, watched the same show and talked.
In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail we used old newspapers instead of plastic bubble wrap. We used a push mower for the lawns not an engine that burns gasoline. We exercised by working not running on electric treadmills.
We refilled pens with ink instead of buying new ones. We replaced razor blades in a razor that lasted for many years.
People took the bus or the children rode bikes to school or walked instead of their Mums being a 24-hour taxi service in the family’s $45,000 SUV, which costs what a whole house did.
We didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space to help me find the nearest take way (which by the way was a monthly treat, not a daily).
It is sad isn’t it that our young people do not realise that we had the “green thing ‘” IN ABUNDANCE We even grew our own food and ate herbs from the garden, not from a plastic tube that they tell me is as good as the parsley that I just picked before dinner.
Each generation has much to learn from the other, that is the way of the “GREEN THING”
Health is your wealth
Barbara
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net