Leadership Quote by Bill Janklow

"We've become a plastic society" is the kind of compact indictment politicians reach for when they want to make moral rot feel tactile. Plastic is cheap, shiny, ubiquitous, and nearly indestructible; it looks like substance while signaling disposability. In four words, Janklow turns a material into a diagnosis: a culture that prizes convenience over craft, surfaces over depth, and short-term gratification over long-term consequence. The line works because it smuggles an environmental image into a social critique. Even if you never think about landfills, you know what it means to handle something that feels fake.

Coming from a career politician, the subtext cuts two ways. It can be read as a populist lament about consumer culture hollowing out community, or as a swipe at performative politics itself: promises molded for the camera, slogans mass-produced, accountability forever deferred. "Plastic" also carries an aesthetic judgment - not just wasteful, but tacky. That matters. The phrase isn't aimed at policy details; it's aimed at taste, at the creeping sense that public life has become a showroom.

Contextually, Janklow's era saw the boom of big-box retail, relentless branding, and a media environment that rewarded image management. Plastic became the perfect metaphor because it is both marvel and menace: a triumph of modern manufacturing that doubles as a symbol of permanence without meaning. The sting is that plastic doesn't decay; it just breaks into smaller pieces. The implication: our values might be doing the same.