It’s a new year and usually I blog about green New Year’s resolutions. But, this year, I read something on Facebook that I wanted to talk about instead.
A friend of mine posted a status I am sure she copied from someone else. I won’t post it all because it was rather lengthy, but I will give you the Reader’s Digest version. It talked about how “she” went to a grocery store and the cashier suggested she bring her own bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.
She then replied, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days” and went on to mention several things. The post talks about turning in milk bottles instead of using plastic, walking up stairs as opposed to using energy for an elevator or escalator, walking places instead of driving a car, washing cloth baby diapers instead of using disposables, using hand-me-down clothes rather than buying new ones, – well, you get the idea.
She concludes it with saying “But, our generation wasn’t green.” That got me to thinking. Some people do blame past generations for the problem with our environment today. While I applaud their efforts to clean stuff up, you really can’t blame it all on past generations.
Yes, bad things were done to the environment, but in some cases today, things seem worse rather than better to me. Case in point is electronics. Back when I was growing up in the ‘70s, if your television broke, unless you just made a lot of money, you paid to have it repaired. You didn’t upgrade to the latest greatest television just because you could. Today, if a television breaks, you just dispose of it and get a new one. Same thing for DVD players, iPods, computers – the list goes on and on.
I realize there are ways to recycle all the electronics we have, but it still makes be a bit sad that things rarely get repaired any more. Maybe if today’s generation really wanted to green things up as much as they profess, they’d stop and look at this too.