Shock and Awe Meets the Three R's

Mrs Ned came back from her local Starbucks with the following report. Seems she took her paper cup back to reuse it, and it provoked this response from some of the store's customers of the female persuasion. 'Oh! You brought back your cup!"
Now, this observation was made apparently in a similar tone to one that someone would use upon seeing Jesus and the Twelve Disciples, or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, come in, order grande skinny mochas, and then fall into a switchblade fight over whose turn it was to pay. Or if they were to observe a giant ape stick his paw through the front window, grunt an order, and then offer to pay for it with a Discover Card.
Americans profess to be amazed that someone would actually bring their own cup to a coffee shop, not to mention a paper one they have already used at least once, and then have the consummate daring to brave cancer, plague and dengue fever by reusing a cup.
Ned reckons they are either narcissists of the highest order, or in serious need of sensitization to some basic rules of sustainability: to reuse something is best, far better than 'recycling' which in most cases simply puts off the day when the resource will be discarded and wasted.
Ned wishes his many friends a good day.

Middle Class values

Ned's more erudite readers will be aware that David Brooks, Ned's favorite conservative Catholic columnist, writing in the NYT posited that America ought to export its "middle class values" to the developing world. Ned's first response was to recoil in horror. However, he should have known that others would take up the cudgel and pound Brooks's well-meaning thesis into the mud where it so richly deserves to forever reside.
For one Sridhar Subramanian of Ned's old bailiwick, Goleta California, home of UCSB, has written a modest tirade that appeared in today's NYT. In it, he derides the idea that this country should export such nonsense, saying, in effect, if the typical middle-class and plutocrat values of overconsumption and waste were to become the norm in India, his home country, then the planet would suffer an ecological disaster.
It goes without saying that Ned energetically concurs, and would add further that if other American "values" like titanic hypocrisy, interfering in other country's internal affairs, carrying out undeclared merciless wars of aggression against anybody we don't like and creating enraged 'terrorists' by the thousands in the process, despoiling the planet by deforestation as was carried out in Vietnam, and so forth ad nauseam, are similar exports then the world can readily do without them.
But Ned predicts that sanctimonious hypocrites by the thousand will crawl out from under their dark, dank hiding places and decry this 'un-American' traitor, and demand that he 'go back to India.' Sridhar only expressed what many Americans believe but have been too cowed to express: that the values inherent in this decadent "capitalist paradise" are toxic to life, mental health and soul, and God forbid that any other country is so misguided and benighted to consider taking them on.