The story is about an old lady in a grocery store, to whom the store manager advised to bring her own grocery bags. The store manager said that because the old generation did not care enough to save our environment for future the current generation is under serious threats.
The old woman apologised the manager and said, “Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back all these glass items to the plant to be washed and sterilied and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were truly recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our day. Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags which we reused for numerous things. 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. 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. Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house; not a TV in every room and none with a screen the size of the state of Montana.
In the kitchen, 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 in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.
Back then, people took the street car or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had only one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerised gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 36,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger 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?” Old is always gold; isn’t it?
