Featured here is our great-granddaughter, Brynn Daane, creating beautiful green art on one of our fun Art Days at the dining room table. Green! A wonderful color for art, foliage, gardens, cooked and buttered veggies, the Irish, frogs (I mean pond creatures—not French people), and Green Bay Packer uniforms. Just as I do, Brynn loves to paint a green scene; in fact, she named her finished work “The Green Jungle”—and it’s a remarkable piece of abstract art! BUT . . . isn’t there always a “but”? “Green” can also mean “SICK”!
Many decades (actually I think it was eons) ago, in my “Live on the Edge Youth” I went by myself to our Wisconsin State Fair Park which was a short bus ride from our home in Wauwatosa. Why did I do this? I loved carnival rides, and there you have it.
After brushing up on the tame stuff, I went for the LOOP-O-PLANE. (I think that’s sometimes called a HAMMER.) On a tall vertical pole two units of swinging cages go back and forth, passing each other en route—higher/higher/higher until every passenger gets the delightful opportunity of hanging upside-down. And, if that were not enough, each cage (containing two persons) has the joy of a suspended, upside-down pause in the altitude—at which juncture nearly everyone screams but some simply throw up.
After the LOOP-O-PLANE adventure, I made for that homebound bus as quickly as I could! Perhaps the bus was green; I can’t recall. But when I walked in our kitchen door, my mother looked aghast. She said, “Margaret! You are GREEN! I don’t even want to recall what happened next!
So where are we going with this gruesome meander? Right up to the current moment, when suddenly it seems that everything has to be GREEN! By way of disclaimer, “Amen” to a sensible, balanced diet. “Yes” to avoiding junky fast foods. “Oui, oui” (now I am speaking of the French frogs) to recycling plastic bottles and tying the newspapers in bundles. Those things are a DUH! The DUH of the century—not even worth talking about, any more than I would go on about painting my toenails or blowing my nose.
Although I may someday be told that I “should”, I will not give a tiddelly hoot about whether or not my teeth might fall out from commercial toothpaste. Nor will I fester in a frenzy of angst over the possibility that my skin will decay due to using some economically priced body lotion purchased at Walmart. And, believe it or not, I still have a long, swishy, fairly respectable mane after 10 decades of commercial shampoos.
GREEN has gone too far. Constantly I hear people say we should all get back to exclusively using only those good things God put on the earth. Have these proponents of GREEN forgotten that the earth fell with Adam? Well it did, and consequently there are lots of things in and on the earth that are not good—things like poison ivy and bad apples which make one really turn GREEN.
The GREENIES are rarely consistent! Poppies grow in the earth; yet oxymoronically enough many GREEN addicts are obsessed with the idea that anyone (even happy, arthritic octogenarians) seriously needing a poppy-derivative prescription drug will end up selling pills on the street!
Some of the “Anti-Prescription Drug” ilk think it would be far better to drink booze and smoke pot! Never mind that booze and cannabis will undoubtely kill incentive and ruin relationships—while by relieving debilitating pain, a well-monitored prescription serves to enhance one’s activity level and quality of life!
I am very sick (LOOP-O-PLANE level sick!) of hearing the word “GREEN”, and seeing it splashed all over the place wherever I go! I am sick of hearing talk about what we should or should not put on our skin, or into our stomachs! Like fake sugar. Artificial sugar was developed/discovered/whatever, in the mid-nineteenth century, but it took awhile to catch on. My dear father used fake sugar from the inception of its popularity—maybe back in the 1960s (?) Dad remained healthy for three more decades till the end of his life, fake sugar notwithstanding. But then, he only lived to be 102—so what do I know?
My friend, Karen, and I agree that what really sticks in our craw is how so many young folks are sanctimoniously (self-righteously!) preaching those very things that we grew up automatically doing. But we didn’t make a big deal of it. We ate a balanced (home cooked, at that) diet. Yes we drank sugary sodas. Yes we ate a plethora of sweets. Our mothers baked them, and we gobbled them up after school before going out to play in 15 degree weather—and build snow forts until the dinner bell rang.
Then we piled indoors, draped our snow-packed wool wraps over the steam radiators—and thankfully sat down to eat a reasonable serving of war-rationed meat or casserole, plenty of veggies (home-preserved), a bowl of home-canned fruit, and Mom’s homemade bread or dinner rolls followed by cake, pie, or cookies. It’s not too amazing that many of us are living happily ever after, and still knowing precisely how to take care of ourselves. DUH!
Regarding the logical process of recycling, during the Great Depression it was common for women to unravel old sweaters, and re-knit whatever yarn was still usable into mittens or scarves. We saved every string, every paper bag, every box, every glass bottle and jar, and every old piece of clothing for some form of a new life. DUH again!
I have no complaint with anyone choosing to be frugal (in fact, I applaud that choice) but I simply cannot stand the supercilious attitude which pompously assumes “We are the only ones who ever thought of recycling, and we are going to save the world from all the stupid people who refuse to go around yelling, ‘GREEN!’ ”
Would these same arrogantly Green pontificators be able to march stalwartly through a Depression and two Great Wars like my parents did, or would they choke on their meager portion of lettuce while crying because they could no longer afford to update their electronic “devices”?
Give me a break!!! Can’t we go back to that rational mentality where “GREEN” means a child’s painting, perennials popping up in spring, a dish of green beans (and they don’t have to be raw!!!), an Irish logos, a Packer uniform, or a terrifying trip on the LOOP-O-PLANE? I am about to scream: “RED LIGHT! NO MORE GREEN!”
Margaret L. Been, 2013
P. S. The problem in America and around the world is not what we put into, or on, our bodies. It is what we put into, and on, our minds!!!
Northern Reflections--glimpses of gold by Margaret L. Been 