Double standard

I got (indirectly) called a hippie at a barbeque on Memorial Day weekend because I am making cloth diapers and wipes, and making a rag rug from the scraps of material for the diapers and wipes. One person asked me if I was going to start using an outhouse like a hippie after I mentioned these various projects. Everyone laughed, even me, because it was funny. It was only the next day that I realized what had really happened.

I reflected on this situation and, like I always do, thought about a question I should have asked my accuser: Would you call your grandparents hippies? Because I am only doing things they had to do in their lives.

Disposable diapers, disposable wipes, disposable nursing pads…these are all relatively recent inventions. But a lot of people don’t stop to think about what their grandparents did, and even some of their parents, did. I was cloth diapered as a baby. Our parents were cloth diapered as children. Disposable diapers only came about in the 40s, and then it was a luxury. Generations past used only what they needed, reused what they could. That is what I am trying to do…not only is it more economically sound, it is more environmentally sound. So now there is a double standard: when our generation does this it makes us hippies, but when our grandparents and parents did it, they were just doing what they had to do because there were no other options.

I fear that this lack of planetary/environmental awareness is rather pervasive in my generation, and this makes me sad for my kids and the planet they will inherit.