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It is routine for Guy and I, our kids, and my dad to have dinner together on Sunday nights. While sitting around the dining room table recently, Dad and I were talking about family vacations, interesting events in a family with eight kids. We would load up the station wagon: Dad driving, Mom in the front with a baby on her lap, and the second youngest kid between them. The rest of us would settle in the back seat or the way-back, which at that time had no backward facing seats. Our kids were aghast. A baby on your lap? Kids in the back. No seatbelts? That’s dangerous. That’s illegal!

Our children, born in the ’80s, have no memory of customarily being in a car without wearing seatbelts. Their worldview sees them as always having been. It’s just since the late ’60s that cars came equipped with both front and back seatbelts, and since 1985 that it was required to wear them in Illinois. While baby seats in cars are taken for granted now, when I was growing up, babies were held in laps, laid unstrapped in unsecured car beds, or placed in flimsy child seats, usually with a steering wheel, designed not for safety, but to keep them put.

Dad and I laughed about the drive to one vacation when it rained like crazy and the current baby got car sick and threw up all over my mom, more than once, causing us to stop at gas stations while she cleaned him up, changed their clothes, and dropped the old ones in the trash. The kids wanted to know why she’d do that and we said that she couldn’t keep pukey clothes in a hot, crowded car. They said, why not put them in a plastic bag? It was 1964, and plastic bags weren’t widely in use yet. That thought kind of shocked us all.

While bread was already packaged in plastic, and plastic sandwich bags were around, it wasn’t until the mid ’70s that large retailers began using plastic bags. The grocery stores first began using them in 1977; Kroger and Safeway not until 1982. If my memory serves, the grocery store in our neighborhood started using them a year or two later. The huge widespread use of plastic bags is relatively new.

What on earth do seat belts, baby seats and plastic bags have to do with anything, and why do I bring them up? In all cases, we’ve made them a part of our lives, as though they’ve always been there, in a relatively short span of time. While in two cases this is a good thing, in one it’s not.

Each year the world uses something like 500 billion plastic bags that have created an environmental nightmare with no easy fix. There is some good news, countries and cities around the world have begun to or are moving toward taxing plastic bags or banning them. Rather than using paper, which has its own environmental problems, movements toward reusable plastic or cloth bags are increasing in pace and are becoming more mainstream.

It is my hope that in a few decades when our kids are sitting around with their kids, laughing about family vacations or other memories, they are as stunned as my kids were, but over the fact that we used plastic so often and so casually. I hope by then the solutions we create for our current follies work so well that they think of them as always having been there. It seems to me that if we can adopt new ideas fairly quickly, when they turn out to be bad ones we can choose to replace them just as quickly.