New Jersey’s stupid laws have unintended consequences (Opinion)

Nobody wants clean waterways and a clean environment more than I do. I'm a fisherman, a hiker, and a homeowner near the water.

I go to the supermarket just about every day. I stuff a few of the same plastic bags that they've banned in my back pocket before I go into the store. You can get 300 of them for under $15 on Amazon and they say thank you. What could be more pleasant than that?

Most rational thinking people understand that the new plastic bag ban is a wasteful joke. It's well-intentioed. Nobody wants to see random single-use bags stuck to trees or God forbid some sea turtle's head. nSo the geniuses in the New Jersey Statehouse and our genius fearless leader Phil "Murphy's Law" Murphy passed a law that banned those horrible less-than-paper-thin lighter-than-air plastic bags.

Now people have purchased "reusable" bags that many people are throwing away taking up more space our landfills far more than those evil plastic bags. But shut up and obey, you horrible turtle-hating polluting rubes.

So now that people are creatures of habit and have spent a lifetime buying groceries and having the store put them in a bag (paper or plastic) and be on their way, they forget the new rules.

So, people go into the store without their compliance bag, some still wearing their compliance mask our leaders ordered during the pandemic, and they don't have a way to get their stuff out to the car.

Some of these horrible rubes are taking the basket they walked around the store with and just putting them in their cars. All the supermarkets I shop at say they have lost a lot of their baskets to these horrible turtle-hating people. But thank God or Phil Murphy, whichever one you worship more, we now have paper straws at restaurants and fast food joints.

For decades McDonald's served their soft drinks in waxed paper cups, now they're full plastic

However, their straws (which would take much less plastic to make than a cup) are made of paper. Yay!

Two shopping basket caddies that used to be full of shopping baskets are often empty.

After going down a few checkout isles, I found one. Yay again!

Stupid laws have inconvenient and sometimes harmful consequences. BUT AT LEAST SOME OF US FEEL GOOD ABOUT WHAT WE'RE DOING TO SAVE THE TURTLES AND THE PLANET. Yay again.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Dennis Malloy only.

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