My Children
My Children – well not all of them as two are now teenagers who don’t speak but only grunt – often chide me about my somewhat lazy attitude to environmentalism. In particular they seem to believe that I m personally to blame for all the current environmental ills we face. So it was interesting to read the story below which touched a chord with me and might do with you as well (at least it chimes with my childhood memories) which is why I share it with you now. In the queue at a supermarket, a young checkout assistant told an older man that he should bring his own grocery bags because disposable ones weren’t good for the environment. The old man apologised to her and explained: "We didn’t have the green thing back in my day." The young woman responded: "That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment." She was right – our generation didn’t have the green thing. Back then, we returned milk bottles, soft-drink bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the factory to be washed and sterilised 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 we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the corner shop and didn’t climb into a two-ton car every time we went shopping. But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day. Back then, we washed the baby’s nappies because we didn’t have the disposable kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 240 volts. Wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. But 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 screen the size of a handkerchief, not a screen the size of a football pitch. We drank from a water fountain or tap 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 blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole caboodle just because the blade got dull. But we didn’t have the green thing back then. Back then, children rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their parents into 24-hour taxi services. And we didn’t need a computerised gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest chip shop |
Andy
Lord, Branch Secretary