This commentary isn’t about James Brown, the godfather of soul, but about having to pay for bags at grocery stores after the first of the year. When someone leaves the supermarket with a plastic bag that bag often contains four or five other plastic bags with produce, etc. Apparently those ‘inner’ bags somehow don’t count in this environmental equation. What can explain this leave of common sense? One can certainly conjecture politically progressive brownie points as an objective. Referring back to the pop culture word usage of James Brown: What bag are you really into?
In addition to the obvious nonsensical nature of this new law for those sincerely concerned about plastic bag pollution, it will cost consumers more money. And coincidentally, or not so coincidentally, this new expense is regressive, like so many environmental regulations, and unequally punishes those least able to pay. I remember when everyone carried their own cloth bags to the store having spent my early childhood in an inner city neighborhood about 60+ years ago. We were not affluent enough to give out free bags.
Given the depression, the war and some personal tragedies, my grandmother didn’t smile a lot. But one day she was beaming when I walked into her kitchen. She was washing out, to save, a plastic bag that some produce had came in. “Look what they gave me at the market for free!” she exclaimed in amazement at the prosperity we had achieved.
We have now lost that prosperity, and use other idioms to express what we are afraid to say.
Copyright 2014, Mark L. Bennett
No comments:
Post a Comment