Drinking from the garden hose

When we were kids they used to do better at cleaning the city’s drinking water. These days contaminants are so common that tap water isn’t considered safe in a lot of places, and even here in one of the wealthiest places in America we get boil orders so often I’ve just stopped drinking tap water…I even fill my dogs drinking fountain with bottled water for his protection.

That’s why the hose option is so novel for Gen X childhoods…we were the last generation to have clean safe drinking water come from any tap on the property.

Yes, we've been told that drinking from a garden hose that leeches plastic chemicals into the water is not a good thing. It won't kill you right away, but those forever plastics do embed in your bones for the long haul.

It's like prior generations who ate from dishes where the glazing process included lead. People ate off those plates and didn't die immediately, but they did suffer from health-related problems later as the lead became embedded in their bones for the long haul.

It's not courage to do what you've always done despite scientific evidence suggesting what you have always done is not healthy. In polite society, we call that choosing to be ignorant or thinking it's perfectly fine to pollute the air with "beautiful clean coal" because that's the way things were done before it became known that coal is neither clean or beautiful. Hey... can I bum a cigarette off of you?

I did it, and my kids did it. We survived.

I did it and I'm an elder millennial. I wonder if it's because we've heard so many Gen X'ers talk about it. I mean hell I'm pretty sure boomers also did it, right??

We all did it, even my kids…until our water quality became poor due to bad maintenance by the government.

I have done it.