The Green Thing

I have been a bit snowed under with one thing and another.. have photos, but not today :-)
Today my daughter sent me an email forward, and this one is worth the sahring..how many can relate to this..

At the check-out, the young operator ridiculed an older woman and told her that she should bring her own grocery bags when she went shopping because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.
The woman apologized to her and explained, "It's a bit awkward for my generation as we didn't have the "green thing" back in my day."
The clerk responded, "and that's exactly our problem today.  Your generation did not care enough to save our environment." She was right -- our generation didn't have the "green thing" back then. 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 oh no, we didn't have the "green thing" back in our day.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 every time we had to go to the corner dairy.
But she was right. We didn't have the "green thing" in our day. Back then, we washed the baby's nappies because we didn't have the throw-away kind.  We dried clothes in the sun and the wind on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up precious energy -- 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 young lady is right; we didn't have the "green thing" back in our day.
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 handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of Lake Taupo.
In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.
Back then, we didn't fire up a petrol engine 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.
But she's right; we didn't have the "green thing" back then. Instead of buying a cup or a plastic bottle every time we needed a drink of water, we ran water from a tap into a cup or glass that we washed and put away for next time we were thirsty, we refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we either sharpened or replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.
Back then, people caught the tram or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their mothers into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances.  And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint. But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the "green thing" back then?