It’s another day at the neighborhood grocery store for Katrin and me, that time of the week to stock up on all the canned soups, pre-packaged tortellinis and frozen pizzas that will fit into our cart. Like most men I know, I’ve never liked shopping, though I accept its necessity in the cruel cycle of life: shop – pay – carry – unload – eat – shop. What’s more, we’ve become quite efficient in our mundane routine. Each person is charged with specific gathering tasks: she the fruits and vegetables, I the snacks and alcoholic beverages. She the meats and spices, I the frozen goods and alcoholic beverages. We wind through the super-labyrinth like Michael Schumacher through Monte Carlo, negotiating abandoned children and old ladies like so many potholes and orange cones. In no time flat we are at the check-out line, well ahead of the so-called competition. With the speed of assembly line veterans we feed our spoils onto the conveyor belt, and as rapidly we place them back in the wagon on the other end. We pay and then race our cart to a waiting counter, where we load everything into cotton bags we’ve brought along…

Wait a minute! We do what?

You read correctly: We load our shopping into cotton bags which we brought with us. No, we’re not taking jobs away from high school kids saving up for a new iPod. There’s no job to take away from them. In Germany, there’s no pimply-faced teen on the other side of the cashier. No bagger-of-the-year plaque hanging above the manager’s station. No chanting of that grocery store mantra that makes tree-huggers cringe in disgust and nervous men sweat with indecision:

Paper or plastic?

Like with so many other aspects of life in Germany, the decision has been made for you.

Cloth.

They cost about a euro (currently around $1.31) a piece and last a lifetime. Sure it’s a bit inconvenient if you forget them, but according to this Reuters article, American shoppers go through 100 billion bags a year. Each one of those plastic pollutants takes 1,000 years to return to the dust from whence it came. Alarming, no?

What are we Americans doing about it? As usual, not much. But the Swedes are. IKEA – the McDonald’s of student furniture – will start charging customers at their 29 nation-wide stores 5 cents for each disposable bag. The new policy is not a scheme to make more money – proceeds will go to the American Forests conservation group – but rather to save us from drowning in a polyethylene pool of our own making.

I’d pay 5 cents for that.

Or, better yet, bring my own bag along.

Reading this article in the New York Times this morning about the madness that took place in Utah yesterday as well as other recent such acts of violence throughout the country, I wondered how headlines and reactions would be different had foreign terrorists been responsible for the barbarity instead of American citizens. I am convinced the uproar would have been so shrill, so deafening, that politicians from the mayor to the president would now be in the middle of a high-profile “Protect the FatherHomeland” scare-campaign aimed at ridding our peaceful streets of this (surely) Muslim Menace.

But the terrorists in these cases – and countless more just like them – are fellow countrymen, patriotic, law-abiding, God-fearing folks simply exercising their second–amendment rights. Nope, no cause for alarm here. These stories may be a day’s worth of media chatter, but let us not be distracted from the true threat to our Way Of Life™, which lurks everywhere among us, though it can’t be seen.

Until it’s too late.