05/10/2024
🌿 Reflecting on "The Green Thing" 🕰️✨
A timely reminder from the past about sustainable practices that we once took for granted. Let's embrace these lessons to enhance our present and future. Join the conversation on sustainability and follow American Eagle for more insights! 🌍💚
A young 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. The young clerk said, "Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."
Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles, and beer bottles. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over. They really were recycled.
Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, which we reused for numerous things. We walked upstairs because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two 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 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our day. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand new clothing.
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, not a screen the size of the state of Texas.
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.
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 with a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.
Back then, people took a bus and kids rode their bikes 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 in space to find the nearest burger joint.
But the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were.
