The LeftCoaster has a good rundown of the very nasty Earth Day present delivered by the House yesterday. What a disaster.
I remember the first Earth Day in 1970. The Catholic High School I attended let us out for the day to go to the march. It was fantastic, joyful and full of hope. A few years later, quite a lot of good legislation had been passed, and folks were becoming conscious and future-thinking. Then Reagan came in with his anti-intellectual, pseudo-populist bullshit and now my brother, like millions of other mis-informed people, think the hole in the ozone, and anything else associated with “treehuggers,” is a hoax. And he won’t recycle until they pay him to do it, like getting your deposit back on bottles (yeah, they used to do that).
I remember when McDonald’s stopped using Styrofoam to wrap Big Macs due to public pressure. And being seen at the store getting your groceries bagged in plastic was a social disgrace (paper wasn’t much better; you brought your own canvas bags, thank you very much). Boy, those were the good old days. If we’d seen the parking lots full of SUV that awaited us 30 years hence, I don’t think we would have been quite so excited by what we were doing.