![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
not everything is getting worse
Apr. 14th, 2010 08:58 amHuman societies go through mental shifts. Often small things, but the changes are so deep that, looking back afterwards, it's hard to imagine that we once thought differently.
Often these changes are for the better. I'm old enough to remember when smoking was allowed basically anywhere. Even in airplanes. Later on, planes were divided into smoking and non-smoking sections, but come on: this is a small sealed tube; the smoke was everywhere. In a restaurant, if you were nauseated by a smoker at the next table, you could ask to be moved. And just after you settled in at your new table, invariably a person at the next table would light up.
It was just one of those things you had to live with. Now, I'm so used to completely non-smoking restaurants that when I visit a jurisdiction that still allows a small smoking section in a back corner, it seems odd. And it smells odd, too.
Don't even get started on "separate but equal" racial provisions in the Old South. That was before my time and outside of my place, but I know people who saw it on visits, and it seemed weird to outsiders even in the 1930s. Of course the accommodations weren't equal, but in the defenders' propaganda, they were supposed to be. But if that were the case, then why? I've never seen it explained what purpose this served if it wasn't to humiliate and degrade black people. (That was the purpose, of course, but it was strongly denied.) It wasn't that black people had cooties (real or imaginary) and couldn't touch white people's stuff: blacks in the South cooked white people's food, cleaned their houses, nursed their babies, etc. So, what?
We're undergoing another small salutary change right now. Shopping bags. Jurisdictions are banning plastic bags all over, and many are banning free paper bags too. (In the cases I know about, you can still get paper bags, but you'll be charged for them.) I had better stop forgetting to take my canvas bag back out to my car, which I forget all the time.
Good riddance to the plastic bags, which I never liked, especially after the paper ones grew handles, previously the plastic bags' only advantage. They're so small that few items fit into them, so after a large shopping, bringing the groceries into the house was almost as much a nuisance as if they'd been thrown loose into the trunk, save only for having handles.
The plastic shopping bag manufacturing industry, like the tobacco companies before them, are in a panic. They say people like the plastic bags, and reuse them for things like trash can liners and cleaning cat boxes. They do? I certainly don't. The bags are far too flimsy, they're usually the wrong size, and the handles get in the way. You want plastic bags for those purposes, you can buy packages of much better ones in the store, they're no more expensive than the other bags would be if a fair price were charged for them, and they come with useful little twist ties.
The only thing I use recycled plastic bags for is to pack up shredding. We shred a lot, because I have trouble getting banks and credit cards to stop sending me regular mailings of balance transfer checks. I never use them; I'm not even exactly sure how this is supposed to work; and I have to shred them all. But I don't use grocery store plastic bags for this. I use the much nicer plastic bags that the newspaper comes in in wet weather.
Now ... having grunt-workers deliver heaps of cheap pulp paper to your doorstep every morning when you could read the news and comics on the Web ... that's probably the next odd custom to go.
Often these changes are for the better. I'm old enough to remember when smoking was allowed basically anywhere. Even in airplanes. Later on, planes were divided into smoking and non-smoking sections, but come on: this is a small sealed tube; the smoke was everywhere. In a restaurant, if you were nauseated by a smoker at the next table, you could ask to be moved. And just after you settled in at your new table, invariably a person at the next table would light up.
It was just one of those things you had to live with. Now, I'm so used to completely non-smoking restaurants that when I visit a jurisdiction that still allows a small smoking section in a back corner, it seems odd. And it smells odd, too.
Don't even get started on "separate but equal" racial provisions in the Old South. That was before my time and outside of my place, but I know people who saw it on visits, and it seemed weird to outsiders even in the 1930s. Of course the accommodations weren't equal, but in the defenders' propaganda, they were supposed to be. But if that were the case, then why? I've never seen it explained what purpose this served if it wasn't to humiliate and degrade black people. (That was the purpose, of course, but it was strongly denied.) It wasn't that black people had cooties (real or imaginary) and couldn't touch white people's stuff: blacks in the South cooked white people's food, cleaned their houses, nursed their babies, etc. So, what?
We're undergoing another small salutary change right now. Shopping bags. Jurisdictions are banning plastic bags all over, and many are banning free paper bags too. (In the cases I know about, you can still get paper bags, but you'll be charged for them.) I had better stop forgetting to take my canvas bag back out to my car, which I forget all the time.
Good riddance to the plastic bags, which I never liked, especially after the paper ones grew handles, previously the plastic bags' only advantage. They're so small that few items fit into them, so after a large shopping, bringing the groceries into the house was almost as much a nuisance as if they'd been thrown loose into the trunk, save only for having handles.
The plastic shopping bag manufacturing industry, like the tobacco companies before them, are in a panic. They say people like the plastic bags, and reuse them for things like trash can liners and cleaning cat boxes. They do? I certainly don't. The bags are far too flimsy, they're usually the wrong size, and the handles get in the way. You want plastic bags for those purposes, you can buy packages of much better ones in the store, they're no more expensive than the other bags would be if a fair price were charged for them, and they come with useful little twist ties.
The only thing I use recycled plastic bags for is to pack up shredding. We shred a lot, because I have trouble getting banks and credit cards to stop sending me regular mailings of balance transfer checks. I never use them; I'm not even exactly sure how this is supposed to work; and I have to shred them all. But I don't use grocery store plastic bags for this. I use the much nicer plastic bags that the newspaper comes in in wet weather.
Now ... having grunt-workers deliver heaps of cheap pulp paper to your doorstep every morning when you could read the news and comics on the Web ... that's probably the next odd custom to go.
