Convenience Does Not Equate To Need
What in the hell is wrong with people
today? When did we as a society become so wimpy, whiny, and “needy?”
I'm talking specifically about the people who “need” their
precious plastic straws, plastic bags, and etc. in order to have a
complete and fulfilled life and who will weep, wail, whine, and
protest every time somebody moves to ban what they consider to be one
of their life's essentials.
PUH-LEEEESE! Not a single damn one of
these things is anywhere near “essential.” They are, at best,
conveniences. But in the world we've constructed for ourselves in the
last fifty years or so, comfort and convenience are king and queen
and anything that robs us of those things is abhorrent. It's as if
the Founders who alluded to “the pursuit of happiness” and ranked
in in importance with life and liberty were actually fomenting for
the right to the acquisition of unabashed luxury.
I can't help but notice that the vast
majority of these whiners are not old geezers like me. If they were,
they would, like me, remember a time when the things they claim to
“need” didn't even exist and we all got along without them just
fine, thank you very much.
First there was the enormous brouhaha
that ensued when plastic straws came under fire. OMG, you'd have
thought that King Herod, in the guise of Uncle Sam, was going door to
door seeking first-born sons! Somehow, when I wasn't looking, plastic
straws became not only a convenience but some perverse form of
entitlement and a necessity of life. Something
without which society would face certain extinction or, at the very
least, gross vexation.
Okay,
so here comes the old guy doddering in with the inconvenient
observation that until I was in my early teens, I had never even seen
a plastic straw because they
simply didn't exist. They came about as the result of another plastic
product; the to-go cup lid. Sometime in the 1950s, when McDonald's,
Burger King, et.al. started slapping plastic lids on paper beverage
cups, it was noticed that the venerable old paper straw, around since
the 1880s, couldn't stand up to the sharp little points that resulted
when you pushed one through the perforated “X” in the plastic
lid. Those points just shredded the paper and so it was deemed
necessary to find an improvement. A few attempts were made in the
'50s and early '60s, but it wasn't until around 1970 that plastic
straws really took over. Then novelty items like jumbo straws and
twisty straws came along around 1980, by which time a new generation
had totally forgotten that non-plastic straws ever existed. And so
plastic – the new standard – became at first ubiquitous then
essential. Plastic production rose from about 1.5 million metric tons
in 1950 to a staggering 359 million metric tons in 2018. And now,
with the world trying to recover from its plastic pollution hangover,
some tiny voices started saying, “why do we need plastic straws?
What's wrong with paper or metal or even silicone?” And as those
voices grew in number and volume and cutbacks and outright bans on
plastic straws began to arise, so, too, did the shrieks and howls of
protest from those who were willing to swear that they would
literally die without access to plastic straws. Die? Really? I cast
back in my memory to the '50s and '60s and tried to recall seeing the
streets littered with the dead victims of a lack of plastic straws
and I just couldn't seem to recall any. Am I missing something?
Moving
on, I was reading an article the other day regarding New York's new
ban on single-use plastic bags. And the same shrill protesters are at
it again, tenaciously clinging to the position that plastic bags are
some kind of Constitutionally guaranteed right without which they
cannot survive. “Don't take my bags,” they keen. “I ne-e-e-e-d
my bags! How will I shop without
them? How will I feed my family?” I'm serious. These are questions
that are being asked.
Again we go back in
time, and again not very far. The first plastic shopping bags were
produced in the late 1960s. Oddly enough, they were lauded at the
time as a device by which we could save the planet from potential
deforestation at the hands of paper bag manufacturers. Who knew back
then that there would quickly come a time when the accursed things
would be blowing around our streets like polyethylene tumbleweeds,
festooning our trees, languishing by our roadsides, polluting our lakes and streams, and accumulating in great slow-to-degrade heaps in our
landfills, piles that will take anywhere from ten to a thousand years
to decompose.
The first ever
“shopping bag” was made of burlap and was in use as the
eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth. By mid-century a
machine was invented that would cut, fold, and paste heavy paper into
bags. By the turn of the twentieth century – 1912 to be precise –
a Minnesota grocer figured out that people who had to carry
cumbersome packages bought less stuff in his store. So he developed
an inexpensive, easy to use, prefabricated method for carrying a lot
of stuff. It was a simple sack made of heavy paper with a cord
running through it for extra strength and stability and to provide a
handle. The idea caught on. Within three years he was selling more
than a million handled shopping bags annually.
By the
time I was bagging groceries at a supermarket in 1968, paper grocery
bags came in all sizes, from great big ones for great big orders down
to little bitty ones for a handful of penny candy. Occasionally a
customer would come in with fabric shopping bags of some sort, but
they were usually either really old people or the new hippie weirdos.
Either way, nobody used plastic grocery bags......because
they didn't exist! And yet
somehow the world continued to turn, people managed to shop and to
feed their families. They even got to make cool crafts.
My ever-frugal
pack-rat of a mother saved every single paper bag that ever came into
our house. Sometimes she would reuse them when shopping at a store.
More often she would employ them to line household trash receptacles.
My schoolbooks were almost always protected by book covers made from
brown paper bags. Paper bags made great drawer and shelf liners, too.
It seemed there was nothing my mother couldn't do with Scotch tape
and a paper bag.
Then in 1969, some
Swede came up with the plastic bag we know today and the race to
build the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was on. At first, plastic bags
were sort of a novelty. Then a few grocers started offering both
paper and plastic. (Remember being given that choice at the checkout?
I do.) In the early 1980s, major chains like Safeway and Kroger went
all plastic and by the '90s, once again an entire generation had no
idea there had ever been anything else. So now, when the Big Bad Man
comes around and says he's banning plastic bags in order to keep the
frickin' planet from being shrink-wrapped, the ninnywhiners who
consider polyethylene to be a birthright of some sort start raising
the roof and screaming all kinds of nonsense about economic hardship
and such dreck.
I'm
sorry. I went to a store the other day and neglected to bring one of
my dozen or so reusable canvas bags with me. I usually keep a couple
in both my wife's car and mine and the rest live in a big burlap bag
in my pantry. And this was one of those places where you either
brought your own bag or bought one of theirs. Oh, woe is me! What was
I to do? I ne-e-e-e-ded a
bag in which to carry my groceries so my family wouldn't starve! And
these cruel, uncaring merchants didn't offer unlimited comforting,
convenient, free plastic bags. Oh, the anxiety! Oh, the panic! What
was I to DO?! I'll tell you what I did: I plunked down a nickel and
bought a paper bag. And when I got it home, I put it in the burlap
bag with the other reuseables. I am my mother's son, after all. I'll
think of something to do with it. Point is, ain't nobody gonna tell
me plastic bags are an economic necessity. Don't stand there sipping
on your four-dollar-a-cup coffee and sucking on your five-buck-a-pack
cigarettes and tell me you can't afford a nickel for a paper bag.
Trust me, folks,
I'm not some loony lefty who's going to go out and strew recycled
organic rose petals in Greta Thunberg's path. But I do believe that
we've reached a tipping point in the plastic pollution problem and
that we need to get a handle on it fairly quickly. So if I can help
in any way by giving up an insignificant personal amenity for the
greater good, I'll do it. I'll bring my own bags to the grocery
store. After the initial purchase, they cost me nothing other than
the inconvenience of having to remember them. And I dropped a few
bucks on a nice collapsible metal straw that has a “safe and
comfortable” silicone tip and comes with its own “convenient”
carrying case. (See. I can pander to comfort and convenience with the
best of them.) It fits in my pocket and I've gotten tons of comments
and compliments from people who seen me use it. My wife's got one,
too.
In and of
themselves, neither of these actions are a great sacrifice to me
personally. And neither are they particularly significant in the
grand scheme. As a friend of mine pointed out, ninety-nine percent of
the stuff I put in my reusable bags comes wrapped or packaged in
plastic. But you've got to start somewhere and if everyone reading
this would do something similar and give one tiny thought to
something other than their own comfort and convenience for a minute,
maybe something positive would come of it.
Get out of the
sackcloth and ashes and stop mourning the passing of something that
probably never should have been in the first place. Plastic straws,
bags, plates, knives, forks, spoons, whatever are increasingly
inconvenient conveniences. They are not necessities of life. We all
did fine before we had them and we'll all do fine after they're gone.
Okay. End of rant.
But watch out plastic bottles and plastic blister packaging: I'm
comin' after you next.
