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 toexplain: 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 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 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?
Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart ass young person. We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much to piss us off... Especially from a tattooed, multiple pierced smartass who can't make change without the cash register telling them how much.
Tides of tributes have poured in since the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The media, with near uniformity, has been proclaiming that the success of the Queen’s long tenure as head of state was down to being strictly neutral, “above politics” and never expressing political opinions.
Tides of tributes have poured in since the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The media, with near uniformity, has been proclaiming that the success of the Queen’s long tenure as head of state was down to being strictly neutral, “above politics” and never expressing political opinions.
By Harshan Kumarasingham Thursday, 15th September 2022, 4:55 am
However, we know that Elizabeth II believed in the Union. In her Silver Jubilee address at Westminster Hall in 1977 at a time of independence stirrings in Scotland, she reminded her audience of the “benefits which union has conferred… on the inhabitants of all parts of this United Kingdom”.
More recently, four days before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, outside Crathie Kirk, she stated, “I hope people will think very carefully about the future”, which was rightly interpreted as carefully considered support for the Union.
There was, of course, one other union of nations towards which the Queen was conspicuously biased throughout her 70-year-old reign: the Commonwealth. Had a referendum on the UK’s membership of the Commonwealth ever occurred, there is no doubt which result Elizabeth II would have wanted.
The creation of the modern Commonwealth is one of the most curious and extraordinary developments in world affairs since the end of the Second World War.
The British Empire comprised a third of the globe. Colonialism had been brutal, humiliating and unwelcome to many of those peoples who lived under the Union flag. In reaction, freedom movements proliferated that strongly argued and fought for independence. Almost until the end, this was resisted by Britain, sometimes violently.
The fall of Britain’s Indian Empire, and with it the creation of the independent states of India and Pakistan in August 1947, was a momentous occasion.
Undivided India was the most important possession in the British Empire and its loss signalled the beginning of the end. After years of deep colonialism that inflicted subservience and deprivation on so many people, why would a country such as India join an organisation like the Commonwealth, which was indelibly tied to an empire that caused its subjugation?
Queen Elizabeth II and other Commonwealth leaders pose for a group photograph at the formal opening of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting at Buckingham Palace in 2018 (Picture: Yui Mok/WPA pool/Getty Images)
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, was a strong believer in internationalism, but the British Commonwealth of Nations, as it was known at the time, was effectively racially exclusive. Before Nehru and his Pakistani counterpart joined in 1947, there were no non-white Prime Ministers in the group, but Nehru believed that the Commonwealth could be a force for good that could bring to the world “a touch of healing”. It was a sentiment that the Queen unquestionably believed too.
Several leaders from across the old Commonwealth were deeply apprehensive about India’s inclusion for racial and political reasons, but eventually, the advantages were seen. The freedom fighters voluntarily joined the coloniser in what was then, something utterly new.
Significantly, 1947 was also the year when the then Princess Elizabeth pledged in South Africa, on her 21st birthday, to dedicate her life to the “family” of nations that would become the modern Commonwealth. In February 1952, Nehru sent the new Queen a telegram welcoming her as the “new Head of the Commonwealth” and, despite being the only republic in the organisation at the time, India was represented at her Accession Council and coronation.
India’s powerful example would soon be followed by states from across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific, creating a unique, modern organisation built from the ruins of empire. It was to be an eclectic mix of states, freely co-operating “in the pursuit of peace, liberty and progress”. Margaret Thatcher, many years later, when seeing an independence ceremony on television is said to have remarked, “the poor Queen, do you realise the number of colonies that have been handed over since she came to the throne?” before breaking down in tears.
For Elizabeth II, however, these were not occasions of sorrow, but ones where the Commonwealth grew bigger and wider. Independence leaders as diverse as Lee Kuan Yew, Eric Williams, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Archbishop Makarios and Kamisese Mara were welcomed by the Queen as friends and family to join those from the “old settler Dominions” like Pierre Trudeau and Malcolm Fraser.
It could have been very different. European empires had ignited hatred and derision from many independence leaders.
King Baudouin of Belgium patronisingly stated in 1960: “The independence of the Congo is the crowning glory of the work conceived by the genius of King Léopold II.” The original Belgian colonisers, he told his Congolese audience, “deserve admiration from us and acknowledgement from you… it is now up to you, gentlemen, to show that you are worthy of our confidence.” Patrice Lumumba, knowing first hand the brutality of colonialism, reportedly said "we are your monkeys no longer”.
The African National Congress was banned the same year by the apartheid regime in South Africa and Nelson Mandela not long after would face 27 years’ imprisonment for his political activism fighting for Black rights. When he emerged to lead South Africa in 1994, he ensured that his country re-joined the Commonwealth – today with 56 members – after it had withdrawn in 1961 due to pressure from members over its apartheid policy.
That Mandela did this despite the terrible colonial history of South Africa says something of the Commonwealth and the person he called "Motlalepula” – the one who brings rain – perhaps indicating the way Elizabeth II had brought a new climate of multi-cultural community after the winter of empire.
As the Queen declared during the Silver Jubilee of 1977, she herself had witnessed, “from a unique position of advantage… the last great phase of the transformation of the empire into Commonwealth and the transformation of the crown from an emblem of dominion into a symbol of free and voluntary association. In all history, this has no precedent.”
This remains so, 75 years after Queen Elizabeth II made her pledge in South Africa.
Dr Harshan Kumarasingham is a senior lecturer in British politics at the University of Edinburgh
Comment: For those screaming about QEII and Colonism this article is simple to understand and so pertinent. The “Empire” fell before she took the throne in a sense with India’s independence
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