I saw this today and it really hit home. Let me know what you think and if you agree π
Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the much older lady that she should bring her own grocery bags, because plastic bags are not good for the environment.
The woman apologized to the young girl 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 for future generations."
The older lady said that she was right -- our generation didn't have the "green thing" in its day. The older lady went on to explain:
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.
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 school books. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. 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 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 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 blade in a r azor 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 in the family's $45,000 SUV or van, which cost what a whole house did before the"green thing." 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?
Where'd ya gooooo, it's time to make the mooonies
Yeah, I'm a Baby Boomer, as a Young Boomer, I was a know it all, too.
This is such a great post!
As a Gen x'er I really don't care much for the snowflake millennial lifestyle. I feel it was our grandparents who had it mostly right, sure we found out some of the things they did caused problems but people were much more self reliant and less wasteful back then. Yes, life could be hard but the small things mattered not so much in today's 'me,me,me!' I want it now! generation.
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Very true
ughhhhh I know and I hate it
I maybe showing my age a little but I remember recycling coke bottles and aluminum cans as a kid. We got $.25/lb for cans. I can't remember the coke bottles, we usually applied that money to more cokes. That and we rode our bikes every where!
This post makes me rather sad. I'm a millennial myself, and this is a really cliche thing to say, but I think it would've been better to have lived in a previous generation when people weren't needlessly wasteful and ignorant. Excellent post :)
You are so right. I remember my bedroom, in winter there were frozen flowers on the inside of the window because we had cold bedrooms (only one stove in the livingroom). No central heating or something like that. I studied with two sweaters and sometimes my hands were so cold I couldn't write and had to sit on my hands. But is was the same everywhere, so we didn't complain.
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STOPYou older people were reading books, do you know how many trees were killed for those books!
And then you put paper bags on the outside of the books, killing more trees!
And, OMG, those wood burning stoves, killing more trees!
We are way better today, with Amazon delivering our products daily to our doors. We absolutely needed that new plastic cover for our phone, overnight.
It's OK that we used Air Transportation, FedEx transportaion, and a dozen other forms of transportation to deliver our plastic cover - in a a cardboard box, with styrofoam and plastic peanuts.
DEEP DEEP SARCASM ABOVE. . .
Honestly, I (GoldKey - GenX) am utterly shocked by the lack of respect from millennials . . .
Here's a gem I found on SteemIT . . .
10 Great Lessons From Millennial Entrepreneurs.
https://steemit.com/entrepreneur/@steemlover/10-great-lessons-from-millennial-entrepreneurs
...
10 - Millenials are special. Millenials are smarter and better than older people.
Lol you're retarded
Sad but True!! This world is going to hell in a hand basket! I remember when I WAS the remote!! LOL Thank you for sharing!! :)
LOVE IT! She Right, back then we didn't have the green thing, funny I remember collecting coke bottles to return for money!
Great post! The new generation is always playing the victim for everything and passing the blame to anyone else. I'll be resteeming this one :)
great post!
Humans are in trouble for sure.
As a gen-x er..I feel like political correctness has manifested into some sort of beast. It seems like the younger generations are trying to make issues to protest that aren't issues or have been around since the dawn of time. Sure, there are legitimate issues.... but my safe space was smokin a doobie over at Dan's house.
So I'm 32 (don't tell anyone!) and I can clearly remember all the points you touched on and remember how quickly everything changed! Not every bit of 'progress' has been anything more than convenience, consequences be damned. What a great post, I hope we can soon merge the past and the present into a better future! Thanks for sharing, you've given us all something to think about!
This is not something I really thought about until now. Thanks for the post!
Thanks for the post! I have always been a stickler for recycling & reducing the use of plastics. Yes, plastic packaging has made life a lot more comfortable than the more healthy practices of the older days. But at the rate at which we are going, it is not long before the coming generation will ask a similar if not more demanding question to the likes of the young cashier in your story. They would probably say :
"That's our problem today. Your generation messed up big time and did not care at all to save our environment for future generations."
I definitely agree, but then I also think about the industrial revolution and how the "quantity over quality" mentality was created when producing products. This was when products started being made cheaply so that consumers would have to keep buying in the future.