I'm not against reusing, reducing or recycling... I've done it my whole life, I learned it from my mom and my grandparents. These are people who knew what it meant to conserve. They weren't wasteful and they taught me not to be wasteful. It makes sense for families to be mindful of every aspect of our lives, I always did it so that we could save money to buy school clothes and Christmas presents, or take a vacation.
Several years ago, Oprah had a "special" program to teach us all how to conserve energy and make our planet HAPPY! She had a family from Chicago on to share their words of wisdom on how to conserve within the home.
They let us know that it's really important to not wash a load of laundry unless you have a full load, don't run the dishwasher unless it's full and be sure to turn off the lights whenever you leave a room. Oh, and make sure you donate your unused clothes and belongings to charity...
My first thought was that these folks are all so seriously out of touch! This is not breaking news... unless you're super wealthy and have servants to take care of your every need... seriously, the proportion of folks that this applies to is almost not measurable, in fact I don't know anybody who doesn't already know how to conserve. I do know a lot of wealthy people who are probably more conservative in every area of their lives than we are. You don't get wealthy by spending every penny.
So, here's the real reason for this blog...
Like I said, I'm not against conserving, I raised my kids to understand the importance of conserving, but just to be clear, it wasn't so that we could safe the planet... it was because it's the right thing to do for our family. Oh, and I taught them to always buy on sale... if it's not on sale, we don't need it.
So, here's the reason for this blog today... I am so annoyed with the indoctrination of "safe our environment" to our children. My granddaughter has spent the night once a month or so since she was really little, she'll be 5 on June 2nd. Needless to say we've watched a lot of child programing since she was born. I started noticing early on that the cartoons she was watching were very different than when my kids were little. In the midst of teaching the ABC's and counting there always seems to be this seriously overt and obsessive focus on the "environment". My sweet little Layla was here a few weeks ago and she was watching some cartoon, the entire program was about reuse, reduce and recycle! I told her that we would find her a show that would actually teach her something that would help her when she goes to kindergarten this August, when she asked why, I told her that her mom would teach her everything this cartoon was teaching her. She was just fine with my answer and I changed the Chanel!
"Being frugal does not mean being cheap! It means being economical and avoiding waste." --Catherine Pulsifer
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