I don’t know if my generation is blessed or cursed. We grew up with parents who had grown up during the Great Depression. We heard things like, “Shut the door, you think you live in a barn?” or “Eat all your string beans, the children in Africa are starving.” or “I walked six miles in the snow barefoot to get to school.” or “Turn out that light, you think I’m made of money?” We, on the other hand, grew up in a time of plenty– so plenty, in fact, that old cliches like “waste not, want not.” were replaced by disposable paper towels, disposable diapers, disposable fabric softener sheets, disposable plates and cutlery, disposable dust rags, disposable mop heads, disposable (instead of refillable) soda bottles, and almost everything else disposable you can imagine.

When we were in high school and college we were told materialism was bad, yet in the big bad ’80s we turned it into a way of life. Yes, my generation is suffering from a split personality. Many of us drive to our local Earth Day Celebration in our spanky new SUVs. We tell our kids “Turn off that light so George Bush doesn’t have to start another war.” then we go out and buy an electric powered toothbrush, an electric can opener and all kinds of electric exercise equipment to go with the cappucino machine, the hot air corn popper, the George Foreman Fat Free Grill, the electric juicer, and sundry other things we could do without electricity if we just had five more minutes in our day.

One wonders what our kids are going to be like when they’re our age, especially if the oil runs out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 4th, 2005 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.