For three years you’ve stood in line at the local supermarket staring, hoping the woman in front of you will say, “No thank you, I have my own bags.”
In April, you balance this dilemma with glancing sideways at the Vanity Fair green issue tucked in beside the National Enquirer and Martha Stewart Home. You have people who understand you somewhere out there. The cover is proof, you think, wielding your reusable bags like armor.
You want to say to the woman in front of you while holding the green issue up (as the check-out boy continues to stuff one item into every bag): “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could celebrate Earth Day every day?”
Uncomfortable with this, said woman runs from the check-out line leaving behind her carriage loaded with plastic and a child sucking on the handle of the shopping cart.
Well, this year, you won’t have that golden opportunity as Conde Nast-owned Vanity Fair has decided that green is more commonplace nowadays. The thinking is that we don’t need to devote a whole issue to what we already know. Surely they could have found something cutting edge to write about in the midst of our green renaissance. How about new causes, new calamities, inventive and hopeful solutions?
We don’t always need Al Gore and Julia Roberts on the cover. Less notable noses would have been fine this year.
They would have been pulled from the Arctic trenches, the polluted bayous and hell storms of wind farm debates. They would have been clad in subdued duds but that’s where Vanity Fair could have had fun staging their scene; styling them to look more worthy in a world that sometimes forgets their worth.