A friend sent me this…I love it! I don’t know who wrote it but it is soooo true.
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 book covers with our names, our artwork or scribbles!
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 (car) every time we had to go two blocks. My grandmother never learned to drive. They had one car. She walked to the grocery store and carried everything home.
Back then we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the throw away kind. We dried our laundry 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.
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 dinner plate, not a screen the size of the wall. 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 blade in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.
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 today more than a whole house did back then.
We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. We had a stack of paper maps folded up in our cars so we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find a friend’s house!
