We are living in a time of ultimate personal and household revolution. We used to be able to go to the pharmacy, drugstore, grocery store, purchase our items, and have them placed in bags for us. We’d carry those bags to our fossil-fuel-depleting cars, bring our over-abundance of consumer demand products into our climate-controlled homes, then happily re-use the plastic and paper bags at will. We were happy to have reusable bags stuffed next to the washing machine, stuck in a kitchen cabinet, ever at the ready for whatever we needed to carry to our next planet-bashing endeavor.
No longer. We have been made to see the light. Our medieval and backward ways have been exposed, and we have all been pushed to acknowledge the error of our paper and plastic greed. Laws have been passed. Laws! Flimsy, single-use plastic grocery bags are illegal in several large cities. Washington state has legalized marijuana and criminalized the plastic bag. Heroin be damned; it’s the billowing plastic bag that is ruining our world. If you want your groceries bagged in paper bags, you now pay 5 cents per bag, and an unidentified emotional sum for the wrath and shame of the checkout clerk and all those behind you for the mere fact that you are either too stupid to remember your own bags, or too greedy to care about the poor over-crowded and under-tended environment. There is a whole new etiquette for standing in line without a bag or two: the false apology. We are so sorry we’ve left the bags again. Bowed head, sheepish mini-smile, eyes lowered. We bear the scarlet letter of shame knowing full well we have wronged our community. Others of us stand quietly, observing the public shaming spectacle in front of us, saying nothing as the screen total increases silently in increments of 5¢. Modern day Hester Prynnes and Arthur Dimmesdales, all of us.
We profess our guilt in advance, in the absence of clerks actually caring what on earth we do. Apologizing – as if we were meant to carry hauling sacks around with us at all times. If we need something boxed are we to bring our own cardboard boxes? Shall we bring our own dollies to Home Depot? Shall we begin wearing individual compost bags so we can whisk away our muffin remains and sandwich crumbs and orange peels and uneaten pita wraps, walking around with the whiff of garbage and compost we usually associate with downtown alleyways and those who shuffle around homeless. Sort of like colostomy bags, I suppose, which we used to (politically incorrect, I know), abhor, and thank every lucky force in the universe that our insides were kept inside, thank you very much, but perhaps we were wrong all along. The folks whose intestines stopped working and needed the bag were the precursors of our own personal bagging system, coming soon in a variety of colors and patterns to match the ecofashionista style demands.
For those who don’t forget, who have nothing to confess at the grocery store, nay, for those who gloat in the righteousness of having remembered their own bags, it’s a little moment of shopping and superiority. Many in my community carry green cloth bags. Bags advertising a phone book company that delivered – without permission or request – phone books to every residential and commercial address in our city; phone books that, to my knowledge, no one uses. This is the post land-line era, the internet-at-our-fingertips period, the age of instant and constant access to knowledge. A phone book company made and distributed cheap green cloth bags and 3-inch thick phone books that went from front door directly to recycle bin, taking up more recycling space and energy than 20 paper grocery bags would have, and now, everywhere you look, your eye catches the sliver of green.
I, too, have a green bag; sometimes I remember to use it, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I’ve even chosen not to use a bag at all, which it turns out is a ridiculously poor decision, since even if I can carry the one or two or three items balanced precariously like a stone cairn, I can’t do so and get out the car keys, unlock the door, open the door and place the items gracefully in the back seat. No, I need a bag.
Let me just say, for the record, I like planet Earth. I’m happy to have been born on it, can’t imagine a life on any other planet, even if NASA is aiming for manned expeditions to Mars in the 2030s. I’m all up for doing my part to take care of things. I’m all up for doing things that make sense. Yet I draw the line at having to carry all the things I need with me at all times, like a snail. I’m a homo sapiens who has settled and assumes I can make daily forages out into the world and then come back to my dwelling. I’d like the freedom to pop into the grocery store on a whim, not a pre-planned and gear-organized trek, to pick up the organic scallions and lemon I forgot the other day but need for tonight’s pre-planned, health-conscious, environmentally-sustainable dinner. I’d like to do all this without apologizing, whether or not I’ve got my green bag subliminally supporting phone book deforestation.