Now, here are the numbers from my latest pet peeve. Every Sunday we get a Hendersonville paper. Allen thoroughly enjoys Sunday afternoons on the sofa reading the Sunday paper, the national news and local news. My mother and father did the same; maybe your’s did too. For nine weeks I weighed the news part of the paper vs. the added advertisements. The average per week is 6.1 ounces of news and 15.66 ounces of unwanted filler. We subscribe to a newspaper for the news, but we are willing to take 2/3rds of it as filler that we don’t want. Do we care that two out of every three trees used in our paper went straight to the recycling bin, or the trash? When do we, as individuals or as a society, say, “No, this is not what I want?”
On this 4th of July I have decided that I want to be part of a country that honors it’s people and the environment more than profit. I choose to wait in line at the Ingles for the person at the cash register rather than the machine. If we all did that the line would get very long and Ingles would hire more cashiers to replace those scanners. We could create jobs simply by waiting in line, together. I will choose to patronize local businesses and offices, where I can talk to a real person rather than listen to a recorded message that may or may not relate to my question. I choose to consume less, and try to teach real values to my granddaughter and the girls at camp, in hopes that they can see through the materialistic hype better than we did, before it is too late.
Those 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence knew what they wanted, and they acted accordingly. We must decide what we want, and do the same.
So far this is what we are doing, as a nation: in 2011, one in five votes taken in the US House of Representatives – fully 22 percent –  involved measures to weaken environmental protections. It will be good for the economy, or so ‘they’ say. Ponder that thought for a while.