This Braveheart/plastic straw ban meme has just layers and layers of meaning baked into it. The meme predates the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020, but it’s become relevant again.
As you probably remember, cities in California and a few other blue states started banning plastic straws, based on a myth that all plastic straws end up polluting the ocean and making Flipper sad or something. (We may be slightly off on the details of this, because we never pay close attention when global warming zealots are warbling at us.)
Anyway, plastic shopping bags were banned in a lot of those cities, too. But it turned out that when “Reality” came back to town, those gross permanent shopping bags that people carry around are really gunky and unsanitary. So, the bans had to go bye-bye all of a sudden, proving that they were never that important to begin with.
It turns out that throwing away some plastic stuff is actually a public health necessity. It’s pretty ironic that people are complaining about government taking away their freedoms now when they didn’t have the guts to protest all the silly environmentalist bans.
