Not so long ago I used to complain about the enormous volume of junk mail clogging my mailbox. That, however, is a thing of the past. Today the problem is the vast quantity of e-mail clogging my computer.
Back in those dear dead days of yesteryear, it was a simple matter to sort the junk from the good stuff. All it took was a glance at the envelope. Not so, e-mail. It is not mail from friends and acquaintances that’s the problem, but the messages from people I don’t know or whose email addresses I don’t recognize.
The spam filter on my Mac turfs out the most egregious spam—the million dollar offers from Mr. Chauncey Jones–Brown, Esq. of Lagos, Nigeria, for example—but often it jettisons the good along with the bad. Thus, I still need to sort out my spam. The following is a message from a friend saved from the spam can. I thought it worth sharing. GPH✠
In the queue at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bag because plastic bags aren’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 our day.
Back then, we returned their 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 they 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, they 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 Montanta. In the kitchen, they blended and stirred by hand because they didn’t have electric machines to do everything for you.
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 they 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 they 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 went on the bus 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.
Isn’t it sad that the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?
Remember: Don’t make old people mad. We don’t much like being old in the first place, so it doesn’t take much to tee us off.
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