No straws please, we’re British
By: Kirk Weinert
Tags: Plastic, McDonalds, United Kingdom, Brexit, Plastic Pollution

We Americans can rightfully say our former rulers in the United Kingdom owe us a great deal of gratitude.

There’s the “saved your butts in World War II” thing.

There’s Winston Churchill, whose mum was born and bred in Brooklyn.

And where would Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and Johnny Rotten be without the inspiration of our Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley? They’d probably be off driving lorries or puttering around with their grandchildren in a cottage on the Isle of Wight.

So, we should be big enough to admit there are some things we can learn from the Brits, Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish.

Take plastic straws. McDonald’s announced a few days ago that it is phasing out plastic straws in the United Kingdom and Ireland by 2019.

I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you know, deep in your heart, that plastic straws are a tiny deal with the devil.

They’re as convenient as heck. Restaurants hand them to you for free. And they relieve you of the dread of an ice cube brushing against your nose during the act of drinking while driving.

But for each of those glorious seconds of sucking, there’s the knowledge that you’ve wasted a precious few drops of petroleum that could be put to far better use. That the cylinder between your lips will lie in a overflowing landfill for your great-great-great-great-great grandchild to deal with. Or, worse yet, you’ll find it shoved up the nostril of a sea turtle or, heaven forbid, in your beer or drinking water in the form of tiny plastic beads.

Well, it seems that the UK has had enough of all that, thank you very much.

First, Queen Elizabeth declared them objecta non grata in her palaces.

Then, restaurants like McDonald’s (for whose cuisine Brits are not quite as grateful to the US as they should be) stopped handing them out willy-nilly.

And, in April, UK Prime Minister Theresa May announced a plan to ban them altogether, as early as next year. (Plastic cotton swabs — aka Q-Tips — will be right out, too.)

Now, some American cynics will say, “oh, that’s just those wacky socialist Europeans, who don’t care about protecting our freedoms.”

To which I’d respond in two ways:

One: Try telling PM May, leader of the Conservative Party, advocate for pulling her country out of the European Union, that she’s a “wacky European socialist”.

Two: To paraphrase an old saying, your freedom to throw away a straw ends at a sea turtle’s nose.

Every straw you and I and our 330 million fellow Americans absent-mindedly pick up adds up to an ocean of junk in no time flat.

But, so too, every letter sent to McDonald’s or Burger King or your hometown’s mayor, urging them to ban plastic straws, adds up to a sea change in attitude.

So, I suggest that we swallow our nationalistic pride and start urging our restaurants and government officials to follow the UK’s lead.

Then, once accomplished, we can go back to lording over the Brits about our superiority in baseball, basketball, hockey, and (American) football. I’m sure they’ll take that well.

P.S. Now Canada is on the verge of banning plastic straws. Can we really bear the national humiliation of being beaten to the punch by Canada, too?