Vernacular

There's a shift in the air. The wind is blowing in a slightly different direction.
When I was an Operations Manager at a big, disorganized, busy bank office, I had, for a time, a remarkable staff. Well trained, proud of their skill, as harmonious as could be expected in a maelstrom of elderly savers in long lines, each was remarkable in her own way.
One classicly beautiful girl with an exotic accent comes to mind. She and her husband had literally run the Yugoslavian border,under fire. She had left her family and made her way to America.
That would be North America, since we greedy bastards sometimes forget there's one to the South, too.
One unusually non-frenetic afternoon, I asked her where she was from. She told her story in surprising, but detached detail, and I listened in awe of her courage and tenacity. When I asked her what impression she had of the States, her answer was both pointed and poignant.
"We had a table," she began, "in our family for generations." Hmmm, I thought. My Operations Officerial authoritarianism must make her nervous, and she's rambling. Poor thing.
She talked fondly, and at some length about her family dining table, and made her point like a slap across the face. "We appreciate what we have."
Her look had the vaguely defiant quality of a person who would run across a border under gun fire.
She was, and is, right, of course.
We throw everything away. We don't launder handkerchiefs - we use Kleenex.
Kimberly-Clark Corporation, which owns Kleenex, as well as Kotex, Huggies, and other fine landfill items, will sue you if you have any influence at all, and use the word Kleenex when you mean "facial tissue." Starbucks, which hands you tall, grande or venti disposable coffee cups in numbers that rival Kimberly-Clark's landfill mass, did sue a local hole in the wall in the middle of nowhere, owned by a woman named Samantha Buck. Her coffee counter was called "Sam Buck's." Too close, baby. If poor Starbucks doesn't fight these obvious forms of misusing their hard fought name, they'll end up like kleenex, a mere descriptive common noun.
Our throw-away society is a brand name disposable society, and don't you forget it.
The New Yorker recently published a fascinating, well-researched article about fascism. It defined the term and gave examples of those who did it best. Mussolini won, of course. Then, the article showed current examples right here in the good old U S of A, and we didn't measure up at all. While fascism is an accurate description of what we're trying to do, we aren't really very good at it. I felt ashamed. Aren't we ALWAYS number one?
I ask this same question of Kimberly-Clark and Starbucks. What is your real mission, disposable item purveyors? You're hocking to the disposalati of the world, and yet you are small-minded and entrenched in the past. You want to be THE brand, and yet you sue when you leak into the vernacular?
You don't see Google suing the Oxford English Dictionary for adding their company's name as a verb, do you?
The winds of change are upon us. Smart intellectual propertarians are outmaneuvering the disposalati, and I predict doom for the latter.
Point - Yugoslavia.