In Defense of My Parents

By way of apology, because I forgot my mom sometimes reads my blog, we all could do better, couldn't we? And we all pick our own battles to fight. I choose to focus on the environment and leave problems such as the educational system to other qualified people. I previously blogged about this concept, tikkun olam. I should not expect everyone to be green.

And we are far from perfect environmentally. I was listening to an interview of people talking about energy efficiency and conservation and they kept mentioning how not wasteful they were, but during the interview they also disclosed that they had 7 TVs, at least one of which was on for 8 hours a day, and they didn't even have CFLs - because they supposedly never use lights even though she does dishes and laundry while he works the night shift. (They also went on and on about immigration problems, so I am trying not to let that bias my opinion of their energy beliefs.) We probably make these contradictions ourselves.

In fact, the other night we bought dishwasher detergent for the first time so Matt wouldn't have to wash the dishes by hand any more and could spend more time with me after work. There is somewhat general consensus that fairly efficient dishwashers use less water than handwashing, but our dishwasher appears to be somewhat old, and Matt was very careful about handwashing frugally. I also suspect the dishwasher will use more energy since we can't turn off the drying cycle and have to remember to stop it ourselves.

We and our neighbors choose to live in a cheaper part of town that requires the city to provide us with a community bus, useful to no one else but those of us who live here. Probably wasteful.

For the last 6 months, I have been driving my car to Marin once a week or every other week because I didn't want to transport my bike on two buses.

And to share the blame, although I previously praised my sister's housing choice for being eco-friendly, she did buy a 2500 square foot house.

So we're all not perfect and we all make tradeoffs. I apologize for offending my parents and for anyone else who read that post.

A friend recently told me that I was her favorite vegetarian because I didn't preach about it. I'm sure no one likes to hear me preach about the environment either. I do feel like taking some actions to help the environment is very important for the future of our world and our species. However, I also feel like many of those options improve my quality of life. Less stress from not driving, healthier eating choices, fresh air. So I would like to share those benefits with others. And my blog is my soap box. But I should only inform and suggest, not judge, and therein lies my error.