Apparently I’m Not “Green” Enough…
According to the internet, I’m not environmentally conscious. Apparently, because I was born before reusable silicone sandwich bags and didn’t learn about the planet from TikTok, I “don’t get it.”
Which is wild, because I was raised 1970s green, back when being environmentally conscious wasn’t a brand or an identity – it was just how things were done.
I grew up watching that commercial with the crying Indian – and yes, at the time we just called him an Indian – shedding a single, devastating tear because someone threw trash out of a car window. That image is burned into my brain forever. You didn’t litter after that. You couldn’t. You’d feel like a monster.
I grew up schlepping empty glass soda bottles back to the store so my mom could get her five-cent deposit back. Five cents mattered. And so did the bottle. You didn’t throw it away; you returned it. It got washed. It got reused. The system worked.
I grew up hauling stacks of old newspapers, magazines, and wine bottles to the recycling containers in the train station parking lot. No curbside pickup. No neat blue bins. Just you, your ugly yellow Skylark, and a bunch of rattling glass bottles. And yes, I absolutely peeked into the magazine trailer to see if there was a Playboy. This was recycling with stakes.
My dad never let a light stay on more than a second if you left a room. Not because electricity was expensive – but because you don’t waste it. That was the sin. Leave a door or window open with the air conditioning on? That was a full-scale emergency. Sirens. Lectures. Possibly grounding.
And I know I’m not alone. If you’re Gen X, you were probably raised the same way. Earth Day started in 1970. This stuff was baked into us. Conservation wasn’t political; it was practical. Waste was bad. Full stop.
Fast forward to today.
I still walk around the house turning off lights like it’s my unpaid second job. It kills me that nobody else seems to understand that light switches have an off position. They’re not decorative. They’re not suggestions. They do something.
I drink out of ceramic mugs. I don’t use lids. I don’t use straws. “No, I don’t need a bag,” is on repeat. I reuse things until they fall apart. And yet somehow, I’m the “old guy who doesn’t get it.”
Apparently what I don’t get is the constant doom-and-gloom apocalypse countdown. I already lived through that once. In the 1970s, Hal Lindsey was out there predicting environmental collapse any minute now, scaring the absolute crap out of me as a kid. We were all convinced the planet was ending by 1985. The only question was whether it would be the coming ice age or global warming caused by greenhouse gases and a hole in the ozone layer.
I’m not a climate-change denier. I’m just aware that the Earth’s climate has always changed – over billions of years. A fifty-year timeline is a sneeze in geological terms. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be responsible. It just means I don’t panic every time a graph trends upward.
What I do panic about is walking into an empty room and seeing every light blazing like a Vegas casino.
So yes, maybe I don’t “get it.” Maybe I don’t hashtag it. Maybe I don’t post about it.
But SOMEBODY IN THIS HOUSE PLEASE, TURN OFF THE DAMN LIGHTS.
Because if that crying Indian taught me anything, it’s this: waste is still waste—even if it’s fashionable now