THE GREEN THING

A-Awareness is the Answer,  B-Be A Believer …If I am going to go down the alphabet, it is time for C-Claim A Cause.  I could stay right on track, but there are so many GREEN distractions along the way that leads to new information I want to share!  The GREEN Thing is too good and too true to ignore and was sent to me just in time for Mother’s Day.  As we celebrate our mothers and grandmothers, we can see them in this story.

THE GREEN THING 
In the line at the store, the cashier told the older woman that plastic bags weren’t good for the environment. The woman apologized to her and explained, “We didn’t have the green thing back in my day.â€That’s right, they didn’t have “the green thing” in her day.
Back then, they returned their milk bottles, Coke bottles, and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, using the same bottles over and over.  So they really were recycled. But they didn’t have the green thing back in her day.

In her day, they walked upstairs, because they didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. They walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time they had to go two blocks.
But she’s right. They didn’t have the green thing in her day.

Back then, they washed the baby’s diapers because they didn’t have the throw-away kind. They dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts  –wind and solar power really did dry the clothes.  Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.
 But that old lady is right, they didn’t have the green thing back in her day.

Back then, they 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 pizza dish,  not a screen the size of the state of Montana.  In the kitchen, they blended and stirred by hand, because they didn’t have electric machines to do everything for you. When they packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, they used wadded-up newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.
And they didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn.
They used a push mower that ran on human power. They exercised by working so they didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.
But she’s right… They didn’t have the green thing back then.

They drank from a faucet or fountain when they were thirsty, instead of buying water in a plastic bottle. They refilled pens with ink, instead of buying a new pen, and they replaced the razor blades with a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.
But they didn’t have the green thing in those days.

Back then, people took the bus or walked, and kids rode their bikes to school or rode the school bus, instead of turning to their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. They had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And they didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites hundreds of miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But that old lady is right….They didn’t have to talk about the “green thing”….it came naturally….it was their way of living! 
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It wasn’t just the “thing” to do….it was the ONLY “thing” to do…and everybody did it.  As we lead our busy lives, we need to think about what we are doing BEFORE we have to fix the problems we create.  My father had an old Webster Dictionary…well used and falling apart when we finally lost track of it.  In the front, he wrote poems about the parts of speech and special quotations.  The first quote was the old adage “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. Simple words we all have heard many times before.  Prevention takes a lot less work than all the curing we need to do in the world today!

                       The way that we live IS the message we give….Live GREEN.