While I was waiting in the train station today, I found myself standing next to a woman carrying one of those now ubiquitous woven polypropylene totebags - the kind you can purchase at your local high-end or natural food market for a couple of dollars and are meant to re-use instead of wasting plastic bags.

Her particular bag advertised the fact that it was purchased to support an environmental preservation and rescue organization, and the side panels of the bag contained a long missive with a large headline proclaiming, “THERE IS ONLY ONE EARTH” in large green letters.

Let me state at the outset that I have nothing against these bags, however ubiquitous and omnipresent. It’s a good thing. I carry a totebag and have canvas and polypropylene totes I’ve amassed at various book trade shows that I use for shopping and carrying stuff. However.

However, there’s a point where a well-intentioned marketing tool like a reusable totebag becomes an ironic and obvious example of the failure of the message - usually because the tool became a trend which everyone bought into and the medium (which was the message) lost the message and meaning (paging McLuhan? Strictly speaking, I know it’s not The Media, but it’s certainly A Medium). This woman was one such example.

Her reusable totebag was stuffed almost to overflowing with regular old plastic shopping bags containing shoes, food and magazines (the visible items) and who knows what other items in the very plastic bags her big bag was meant to replace. Now, I can understand wanting to keep your shoes and food separated in some way. However, there’s no reason the magazines had to be parceled up into their own bag. You might be saying, “But maybe she carries those other plastic bags to reuse them!”

I gave her this benefit of the doubt, too, until I saw what was hanging off her other arm. A plastic bag from the snack shop in the train station (white) with a plastic bag from the newsstand (yellow) within it. And the snack shop bag contained several plastic bags of chips and a bottle of soda. This last bit, I admit, is a matter of strong personal bias. Because she opened her 99¢ jumbo-size value bag of “Funyuns” and started chomping messily - which just grossed me out.

So I have to wonder: did she realize how mixed her own messages were? Probably not. Is she aware of the reason those bags became popular and why people everywhere are carrying them? Has she read the side panel of her bag for an explanation of the environmental impact of plastic bags? I’m guessing, “No” and “No.”

But she’s certainly not the only one, which is part of the problem. The good idea has gotten lost in the relatively short span of time it’s taken this trend to speed over from Hollywood to suburbia.

This woman was just the one who happened to cross my path today and trigger my wrath with Funyuns.