There is a disposable version of everything nowadays. Face and hand wipes, furniture polish wipes, floor sweepers –dang it, we’re all busy and have no time to wash! What surprises me is the complete flip from the 80s.

In the Eighties it was the fad to be environmentally conscious. Everyone was doing it. You were urged to carry your own cloth grocery bags, recycling was hip, you were painfully aware of every scrap that you threw away that would wind up in a landfill, and caring about the Earth was cool.

In fact, all of the celebrities were talking about. I was watching Lifetime today and I had forgotten how preachy the shows were in the 80s. Everything had to have a “message.” On interviews, actor upon actor, would give the same damn speech.

“I think it’s my,” pause here, as actor/actress looks away, searching for just the right word, “responsibility to use my position in the spotlight to make the world a better place.”

They all did it, and if they didn’t use their position as a celebrity to preach to everyone else, why, then, they were wasting their acting talent. And that’s just wrong.

No wonder Married With Children was so popular. Everyone was sick of listening to Dixie Carter go on about feminist issues, Delta Burke sharing her fat chick feelings, and the Golden Girls scaring us to death with the woes of the aged. After having my awareness raised night after night, watching Al Bundy sitting on the couch with his hand down the front of his pants was prime entertainment.

I guess that’s when TV got mean. Of course, with all of the reality shows now I kind of miss it. But it’s still better than being preached at.

So now the germ-paranoid masses are back to filling up the landfills, one disposable towelette at a time.

Speaking of germ-paranoid, I’m going to use my status as vanity-web-site-publisher-and-otherwise-unpublished-writer to preach to you about the evils of antibacterial soap.

Five years ago my husband, Steve, then known as my boyfriend, Steve, got a small cut on his elbow. No biggie, lots of people get cuts on their elbow. This one got infected. Okay, so far no problem. A little infected cut.

One morning I took my daughter to Kindergarten as usual and came home to find Steve lying at an odd angle across the living room floor. This might seem like strange behavior for some people, but not for Steve. He is a rather impulsive person and if he feels like taking a spontaneous nap on the floor then, by god, he’s going to do it. I stepped over his still form and walked into the other room to check my email.

I was on the computer about an hour when I looked at the clock. It occurred to me that it was time for Steve to be at work but he didn’t come say goodbye to me before leaving and, indeed, I never heard him get up. I poked my head into the living room and saw that Steve was lying in the exact same position he was when I got home.

Steve didn’t answer when I called his name. I tried poking him a few times but his body was too hot to touch. A few slaps warranted an incoherent mumble. I slipped on my flip-flops and grabbed my keys, half-dragging his lumbering body out to my car.

The Emergency Room personnel rushed Steve through triage and admitted him immediately. It seems that 106º temperature is considered dangerous. Something about Steve’s bright red elbow being the size of a watermelon alarmed the doctor on duty.

After almost a week of intravenous antibiotics, Steve was worse. The red cloud that was overtaking his skin had spread. All over. Every day the infectious disease specialist would come in and mark the red border with his ball point pen, only to find the next day that it had advanced even further. Between his scarlet skin and rows of wavy black lines, Steve looked like a topo map of Mars.

Steve cried. Not because he was in the hospital, not because he was too weak to move, helplessly watching his body decay right before his eyes, but because a few nights before he got sick we had gone to see Battlefield Earth.

“I can’t believe I’m going to die and the last movie I saw was so bad!” he wailed.

“Shut up and eat your Jello,” I comforted him. “It’s better than that Pirates of the Caribbean event at Disneyland we went to.”

“That’s true,” he agreed. “Give me more mashed potatoes.”

The doctor took me out in the hall and told me that Steve was scheduled to have his arm amputated tomorrow. The infection was getting into his internal organs and the only way to stop certain death was to remove the source of the deadly virus that was marching through his cells.

I was eerily calm. No, this is not going to happen. Steve is going to get well and nothing is going to be chopped off. I was right, by a miracle the red border started to retreat and the doctor put off Steve’s amputation another day. And another, and another, until finally Steve was allowed to go home with all of his limbs and organs intact.

The first thing he did, after getting take-out Chinese food, was watching Star Wars to cleanse his movie palate.

When Steve was still in the hospital, I asked his doctor how something so benign, such as a cut on the elbow, can turn into something as deadly as cellulitis so quickly.

“People overuse antibacterial soap,” the doctor explained to me. He went on to tell me that we evolved right along with bacteria and viruses from the beginning, and we need a certain amount of exposure to them to keep up a resistance. In today’s germ-paranoid world, people are constantly over-antibacterial-soaping themselves, totally annihilating their bodies chances of getting used to germs. That, with the overuse of antibiotics, we’re all slowly screwing ourselves.

I’m not suggesting we all go around licking cat butts or anything, but I’m embracing the germs in my environment and sticking with regular old soap and water, thank you!

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