It is to laugh. I just spoke with someone who had just returned from a grocery store, where the cashier had required her to hold her reusable bag open so that the cashier could drop groceries into it without actually touching the bag.
Really? The reusable bag? According to the lunatic fringe, they are saviours of humankind, saving us from the curse of plastic, single-use containers.
It seems to me that someone recently pointed out in an opinion piece that research in Arizona and California showed that the reusable bag was a wonderful incubator of microbes. And now it seems that the things may harbour viruses that our hard-working cashiers should not be touching.
This Island never had a problem with so-called single-use bags, because they were burned up with the rest of the waste. But the relatively witless people who govern us pay far too much attention to the lunatic fringe.
If there is a problem with reusable bags during this time of crisis, it is because there is a problem with reusable bags. Period.
If people want to use them, that’s their business. If people do not, and if there is a reasonable alternative – and there is – then governments should not be forcing people put themselves at what is recognized as a clear risk.
So let the lunatic fringe scream and yell, beat drums if they want to, demonstrate in the streets. It’s time to tell them that, no matter their acting out, no one is going to listen.
David Bulger,
Charlottetown