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Happy Valentine’s Day — and I bet I made Al Gore cry [Darleen Click]

I’ve been a Hallmark Gold Crown member for years.

According to the industry’s trade group, some 145 million Valentine’s cards are sold in the U.S. every year. Those cards are ridiculous not just because of the sappy sayings on their covers. They’re ridiculous because, on a planet of seven billion people, it’s nuts to buy a piece of card stock, place it into a paper envelope, and give it to someone who (I love you, honey) will smile at it, stuff it in a sock drawer, and, almost certainly, never glance at it again. It’s even crazier to buy said piece of card stock, drive it to the post office, and have the U.S. mail truck it to an airport and then fly it to its destination. […]

Reason is no match for emotion, of course, so it’s no surprise that the dead-tree greeting-card industry continues to thrive. Sentimental pastimes die hard, and greeting cards aren’t Superfund sites. Still, the continued survival of the greeting-card tradition neatly underscores why it’s so difficult to affect far bigger environmental change. At the very least, it suggests people are being less than honest when they tell pollsters they’re interested in making environmental tweaks in their lives, even tweaks that are easy and cheap. It’s hard to believe large percentages of Americans will abide a stiff carbon tax when they’re not willing to stop using throw-away pieces of shiny cardboard to send their love notes.

Not only did I send out a bunch of Valentine’s cards to family, with such encouragement I won’t wait until just Easter.

St. Patrick’s Day, here I come.

15 Replies to “Happy Valentine’s Day — and I bet I made Al Gore cry [Darleen Click]”

  1. Pablo says:

    Some people keep things like that forever as cherished mementos. Does anyone do that with print copies of The New Republic?

  2. sdferr says:

    Sentimental pastimes die hard.

    One might say that the motivating love of one’s own dies never, so long as people are. But making people not is entirely the object of the Malthusean dream-world, and even this is merely another example of love of one’s own, if only as a paltry such thing in a thesis.

    But is Valentine’s Day Phaedrus’s desire come once again to life? Kinda looks like it, if one holds the object just so, such that the light reflects at exactly the right angle.

  3. Maybe I’ll send him a card telling him what to do with his stiff carbon tax.

  4. Shermlaw says:

    That card stock is mostly recycled stuff and/or comes from plants that were–hold on to your hat–grown for paper pulp. And, BTW, why do Progressives have to rain on every flippin’ parade they see. They are pathologically incapable of just letting people be happy.

  5. geoffb says:

    Some agree with Gore, and others have their own agenda going on.

  6. McGehee says:

    My wife still has all the letters I sent her before were married.

    Of course, if we’d both been 20 years younger we would simply have texted, and the greenbots would be complaining about the electricity we used and the number of purple-assed spider mites massacred in digging up the fuel burned in the power plants.

  7. Blake says:

    I celebrated Valentines Day by increasing my carbon footprint.

    1. Drive to store to purchase card? check.
    2. Drive to store to purchase flowers? check.
    3. Drive to where my wife works to personally deliver flowers and card? check.

    Suck it, Gore.

  8. Squid says:

    I stopped reading after he confessed to drinking ice-cold beer. Such people are not to be taken seriously.

    My wife still has all the letters I sent her before were married.

    Both of them? (I keed, I keed!)

  9. I Callahan says:

    Most of the comments over there are a hoot, and mean that at least a lot of readers of TNR still have a modicum of intelligence.

  10. McGehee says:

    I’ll have you know I have written all 26 letters.

    Although sometimes my lower case Q looks obscene…

  11. Scott Hinckley says:

    Although sometimes my lower case Q looks obscene…

    A little quick on the backstroke, eh?

  12. palaeomerus says:

    I’m kind of down on Valentine’s Day myself, but the elites just told us that us serfs don’t need paper. We can use one of the screen things down at the local library, right? Paper is something only the masters need. I mean community guides. I said guides right?

  13. palaeomerus says:

    “I stopped reading after he confessed to drinking ice-cold beer. Such people are not to be taken seriously.”

    Okay, I give up. What the hell ARE you supposed to with ice-cold beer ? It’s not my damned fault that we had widespread refrigeration in the 1950’s and Europe did not.

  14. Shermlaw wrote: And, BTW, why do Progressives have to rain on every flippin’ parade they see. They are pathologically incapable of just letting people be happy.

    Because Power And Control. And because, for them, Happiness is a warm boot stomping on a Human face forever.

  15. The Pursuit Of Leftist Happiness

    In a comment left over in a post at Protein Wisdom, Shermlaw asks a question that Soothsayer Bob will dare to answer. The Question: And, BTW, why do Progressives have to rain on every flippin’ parade they see. They are pathologically incapable of just…

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