by Esther Ramos
Alright, so here’s my question: Before Mattel or Tyco (or whoever they are), outsourced their toymaking to China, didn’t someone from one of their corporate offices go to China to see if their little Chinese children were eating their toys and dropping over dead? How many Chinese toys does one child have to eat before they do drop over dead? How many before it just makes them sick? Or are Chinese children taught not to eat the paint off their toys? Are their toys that are made for local consumption (oops, I meant for local sale and local use), made with a better quality of paint that won’t hurt their children?
Is it a shock to us that we wouldn’t be able to afford all of those dozens of new toys that our children just HAVE to have if they were made by union wages? Or is it a shock to us that foreign manufacturers, making only a few dollars of profit a day, cut more corners than we do? Or do we just not care enough about the safety aspects of our children’s toys, to look into who’s making them, and out of what, until after there’s a problem? Oh! That might be more than question. My mistake.
I would be interested to know how many of us actually don’t know that a really small percentage of everything in our homes, toys included, is made here, in our own towns, by our own people, under our own rules and guidelines. Why don’t we already know these things?
Now, on the other end, I’m sure that toymakers, and any other manufacturer for that matter, with American sounding names, do an amount of investigation and fact gathering before they negotiate a contract for the manufacturer of more and more never ending supplies of stuff for us to buy. Have they been called upon to disclose to us, the public, any of their findings when they did those studies? If these findings have been made public, why have those answers not been included in the ever more and more shocking evening news? Why are we not demanding some answers? In my opinion, it’s our own fault for being passive and naive enough to assume that there are no problems. Finally, why aren’t we manufacturing our own Boy Scout Awards?
