And the Wheels go Round

I've always tried to point out that our lives haven't changed much since we were kids. I mean, we had Rock'n'Roll, Coca-cola, Star Wars, Bubble Yum, Star Trek, Gatorade, ravioli, McDonalds, football, bicycles, cars, buses, planes, TV, malls, video games, swimming pools, movie stars, etc.
But something I noticed today put the differences in our worlds, then and now, into stark, stark contrast.

I used up the last bit of something that was in a jar. For a moment I hesitated before tossing it in the trash. I had a brief instinctual urge to wash the jar and use it for something. The kitchen garbage was full so I took it to the dumpster. Klink..I could hear the glass inside the bag as it dropped. There was a green recycle bin, upside down and empty over by the fence where it had blown or been kicked. Up and down the street, you never saw a recycle bin put out. What happened to pollution, I wondered? How come it was such a serious issue back when I was a kid?

Let's go back to your childhood...childhood..childhood.....

In the summer of 1978 I turned 13 years old. My father was a preacher in a tiny Vermont town. The church was a little red brick building with about 8 rows of pews. We lived next to the church. Behind us was the town graveyard which had headstones dating back to the 1600's. Both of my parents were born to immigrants during the great depression and were young children during the war that followed. In 1978 we were a very poor family but we didn't feel poor because of how my parents had been raised. They were both highly trained to seek out the best possible living under the poorest of circumstances.

Back then you could only get paper bags from the grocery store, and my mother saved every one. We used those paper bags for everything you could imagine, from Halloween masks to luggage. We brought our own popcorn to the movies in a grocery bag. The bag got all greasy.

We saved the plastic bags that bread came in. Among other things, we used these for lunch bags when the small paper bags ran out.

My parents had a black and white TV. My earliest recollection of that TV was around 1969. Around 1972, when my mother was working as a nurse and my father was a high school teacher, and apparently we were flushed with cash, they bought a second black and white TV. The first TV gave out a few years later, or maybe my parents gave it away before we moved to Florida. In 1983 when I graduated from high school and left home, that second black and white TV was still "the TV".

We never had air conditioning until 1978 when somehow my parents got a window air conditioner for their bedroom. I guess we had a briefly unbearable spot of global warming that year. We all slept on the floor of their bedroom. I remember how strange it seemed to leave the room and go out into the hotness of the house. There was a unique odor of hot plaster and old carpeting. I don't know how old that house was but it could have easily been 100.

The water in the house came from Lake Champlain, which is 300 feet deep, ten miles wide, and about a hundred and twenty miles long. It contained a LOT of water and as much as we tried to take it out of the lake, there was always more rushing right back in from Canada, and from rain, and from natural springs in the mountains and in the lake bed. Our tap water was literally fresh spring water. We didn't have a sewer. All of the drains in the house went into a leech field in the back yard where the bright green grass grew six inches in a week.

I remember learning that, back then, my father made about $8,000 a year and yet we never felt like poor people. I had no idea we were poor. In 1978 my mother did not work but instead she took care of us kids, played the organ on Sunday, and she went to school in Burlington a few nights a week. In spite of how poor we were and the kids that she had to raise, she managed to get a PhD in psychiatry.

My family never received any kind of government assistance, except for things like free school lunches, and the church people bringing us things from their farms. We had a giant garden out back, which was a major part of our family food supply. We grew vegetables in the garden to prevent us from starving. My mother made frozen dinners out of saved foil TV dinner trays and kept them in a freezer in the basement, along with home made apple sauce and cider.

Although we had paper napkins, we never had paper towels, cups, or plates. We reused everything, as many times as it could be reused. Jars were not thrown away, they were washed and pressed into service as food containers, flower pots, or general storage. Loose nuts screws and bolts, pins, nails, washers and knobs were put into the jars. Whenever you needed something, there was probably a jar full of it somewhere. My mother saved every rubber band and paper clip that came into the house. Every doorknob had at least a couple of rubber bands on it, that was a good place to keep them. If you ever needed a rubber band, just go to the nearest doorknob. Aluminum foil was used instead of plastic wrap, because you could use aluminum foil over and over. When bars of soap became little slivers they were saved. When you have half a dozen little soap slivers you could press them all together into one big bar of soap again.

My mother extended our milk supply by mixing it half and half with powdered milk. She only bought whole milk because we needed the nutrients. We needed fat. One time someone gave me a cup of skim milk and I thought it was the worst tasting stuff I had ever put in my mouth.

Today, my family only drinks skim milk. Everyone thinks that is what milk is supposed to taste like.

We never had soda, instead we had Kool-aide. Actually, we had fake Kool-aide. We had the less expensive Kook-aide knock off. We never had chips, but we had popcorn.

Books came from the local or school library. I was amazed the first time I saw a store where you could buy books. Something about that seemed kind of stupid.

We ate big meals every day and felt like rich kings. The menus were simple, but of what we had, there was always plenty and as children we were never made to feel like something was missing. The stuff that we didn't have simply didn't exist and we didn't think about it. Having soda pop in your house sounded crazy, like your house was a restaurant or something. Cookies were baked. There was always a half eaten cake on a plate under glass in the kitchen.

Exactly one bag of trash was disintegrated in our back yard incinerator every Thursday. That's one bag of trash for a family of five. What was in that bag vaporized completely because it included no metal, glass, or any kind of other inflammable thing. If you couldn't burn it, you could probably use it again for something. My parents were not environmentalists, eco-hippies, or anything else. They just did what seemed to make the most sense.

Back then, industry had created cans of food like ravioli and spaghetti that were designed to serve two children per can and provided as much fat and calories and nourishment as possible because in many cases that might be the only nutritious thing they would eat that day. We had a perfectly good energy drink. It was called "coffee". Gatorade was consumed by people who actually burned 9,000 calories a day and needed the stuff that is in Gatorade.

There was no violence on TV or in games. You had to create your own violence by acting it out with toy guns or plastic green army men. You had to create the screams of agony with your own voice. "Bang, bang. Ooowwwww. Gotcha! Aaaaaaah I'm dying!" On the fourth of July you could buy actual explosives which could be included in your war games later on, or just tossed at girls.

I remember seeing my mom sitting at the kitchen table doing nothing. I asked her what she was doing and she said that she was waiting for seven o'clock so she could make a long distance call, and that was when the rates changed. I think that back then, long distance was something like a buck fifty a minute, and people were always desperate to point it out when they were making a long distance call. Imagine calling a restaurant across the bay to make reservations, and the first thing you say is "Hello! I'm calling long distance!" today they would think that you're a nut.

The only electronic thing I had was a transistor radio. The three of us kids also shared a cassette audio tape recorder which I had used to record Star Wars at the drive-in theatre. In 1978 I could recite every line of that movie word for word. Despite that, being poor and living in a small Vermont town in 1978 was a little bit like living in the 1800's for us, while a large part of the rest of the world was getting HBO on their color TV's that had remote controls. I didn't touch a TV remote until ten years after Archie Bunker got his.

Gasoline was cheap, and the OPEC oil embargo was a distant memory. Life moved ahead, and the wheels turned, and then the 80's came. The 80's seemed to pull us forward into the modern age. We got cable, computers, video games, color TV's with remote controls, video tape players, air conditioning, cars with air conditioning, cars with electric windows, microwave ovens, things with buttons instead of knobs, video store memberships, check cards, walkman radios, CD's, cordless phones, cell phones, camera phones, desktops, laptops, notebooks, PDA's, MP3 players, DVD players, cars with DVD players in the back, DOS, Windows, AOL, e-mail, e-banks, ebay, e-trade, e-harmony, iPods, iPaqs, iPhones...

Welcome to the twenty-first century. I spend $8,000 a year on booze.

Today, living in the Tampa Bay area, I have a family of seven, which is a little bit larger than my parent's family but not by much since one of my girls is a baby and my son is leaving for college tomorrow. Another of my girls only gets to spend weekends with us (her mother has custody, and I pay about $8,000 a year in child support). Even so, we produce about five full kitchen garbage bags of trash every single day. We have three dumpsters outside to hold all of the trash we produce between bi-weekly arrivals of the magic trash-taker-awayer. We probably throw away at least $8,000 in unused products every year.

Everything we consume comes in a package that gets thrown away. Most of those things when purchased had been combined into larger packages. Soap, toothpaste, deodorant, bottles of ketchup, mayonnaise, soda, shaving lotion, any many other things frequently get tossed when they become half empty. You don't want to run out of anything so you always make sure you replace it before it's completely gone.

Much of the time my kids eat dinner on paper plates with plastic forks and spoons and paper cups or juice pouches. Usually the only thing we have to wash is pots and pans and coffee mugs I just don't feel right about wasting all that water on washing dishes. We probably spend $8,000 a year on disposable dishes. We probably spend that much eating out too.

The fridge always has milk and fruits and vegetables and nutrition is very important to us but most of what gets consumed is instantly prepared (or delivered) and easily tossed in the trash when finished. Everyone is a little overweight. A can of ravioli is considered a snack, washed down with a half gallon of Gatorade. We pay a lot extra for meals that are designed to provide as little energy as possible without tasting like papier mache. Usually these kinds of meals generate more trash by weight and volume than contain actual food.

Again, $8,000 worth of Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine, Lean Pockets, Smart Ones, Smart Balance, sugar free, fat free, low fat, low sodium, no sugar added, low trans-fat, non-hydrogenated, gluten-free, whole grain garbage.

We have two SUVs and sometimes when we go to the beach or to the park we take both of them. So we get a collective 4.5 miles to the gallon. On the back of each we have stickers from GlennBeck.com that say "Hydro-carbon powered eco vehicle" and the hippies give is the thumbs up when we drive by. Hydro-carbon is gasoline. We probably spend $8,000 a year on gasoline.

And the wheels go round.