Going green down by the seashore

Opinion

October 18, 2012

Going green down by the seashore

By Rhetta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist The Picayune Item Picayune Item Thu Oct 18, 2012, 08:01 AM CDT

PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. — The green market here is in a lush park across from the Mississippi Sound and has, among other things, lemons and grapefruits grown just a block away. It also has Christmas crafts made out of oyster shells taken from the Gulf. And miniature cheerleaders selling raffle tickets, and a gardener selling mosquito plants.

Buy from local folks, they say, and you’ll be healthier and so will the economy. Not to mention your own town will keep more of the money you spend; it will prosper and look different from every other place in this paint-by-numbers country.

This is shopping one can enjoy. I buy fresh shrimp from a boat in the harbor for a fraction of what the frozen ones cost at the grocery store. And I get flounder from the local seafood market that’s been here for several generations.

I buy homemade bread from a woman who gives me a sheet of instructions for its care and feeding. Serious bread, she calls it.

The okra and bell peppers and garlic I buy from another market vendor wasn’t picked four to seven days ago — the average lag time for produce in a grocery store — and shipped 1,500 miles, another average. It was picked early this morning and trucked a few miles. I’m helping the environment, the local economy and myself to fresher produce.

I wonder if the country might go back to its old, self-sustaining ways if the economy went totally into the toilet and we were forced to remember the skills we’ve forgotten or tossed. Our grandparents, after all, worked in the fields. Our parents worked in the factories. Only our generation has made its living in that nebulous category called “service.”

If necessary, would we fight back with resilience and determination, or be consumers too soft and weak to go back to barter and basics?

Going green is trendy, true, like yoga classes or ugly German sandals were in their turn. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t all good ideas. Once you’ve bought contaminated dog food from China or infected lettuce from mega-agribusinesses, you start weighing the true cost of cheap discount goods.

People aren’t led by bumper-sticker slogans as much as by necessity, of course.

At a church yard sale, there’s a line waiting for the doors to open. Inside are secondhand items, mostly of a practical bent. People need towels and sheets and clothes and pots and utensils. And here they cost a fraction of what they’d be on Aisle 6 at the nearby box store. There’s no rush on the cemetery rubbings; the furniture is gone minutes after the doors open.

In the nearby chain store, everything came over the waters outside the door in containers from China. I often wonder if they buried made-in-America Sam Walton on a spit, because today he must be spinning like one of his deli rotisserie chickens.

This community was brought to its knees by Hurricane Katrina. The businesses here today mostly are the local, small, family ones that were here before. They rebuilt, arose from the rubble, employed local citizens and reopened as soon as possible. They put their money back into this place.

Did I mention the beauty of the green market? As kids, we used to try to say a tongue-twister about a generic “she” who sold seashells down by the seashore. I met her today, and she does beautiful work.

(To find out more about Rheta Grimsley Johnson and her books, visit www.rhetagrimsleyjohnsonbooks.com.)

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Opinion

Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.”

March 29, 2013
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist

Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.

March 29, 2013
VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008.

March 27, 2013
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists

When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”

March 27, 2013
Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing.

March 23, 2013
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered.

March 23, 2013
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun

The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral.

March 22, 2013
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.

March 22, 2013
Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.

March 20, 2013
Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist

Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley.

March 20, 2013
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