It’s my son’s birthday today, and while we tend to get good middle-class people’s presents (lego, books, etc) we’re not immune to the lure of cheap plastic/die-cast crap. So he’s currently playing with a battleship complete with ‘realistic’ jet aircraft (not that any of them could realistically land on a battleship, but he doesn’t seem concerned with that).
Whenever I see tat like this, particularly on those unhappy occasions when we buy happy meals with their uber-crap, I wonder about the people who make them. I’ve only worked for three manufacturing companies, and two of those were beer and steel, which are practically staples. But the third was clothing, where taste was involved, and I often speculated on exactly what taste was being exercised as a tacky shell-suit or size 24 skimpy nightie passed through my hands.
Imagine, then, how much more puzzling it must be for someone who is working slave-like hours for negligible pay to attach a flimsy plastic rotor to a badly cast toy helicopter that a child somewhere will play with for 11 seconds before losing it in the car on the way back from McDoughBoys. Imagine how much more disconcerting it must be when the worker is a child who can see the fun inherent in that toy, even as they lack the imagination or experience to see the crushing desperateness of their situation.
There is no conclusion to this little rant. Not buying these gee-gaws might take that child out of the factory, but it’s more likely they’ll end up combing trash piles than attending school, so trying to make a little difference may be worse than meaningless without making a big difference too. I guess you get to decide.
7 Comments
Check out “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things”
I saw the recommendation on your blog only this morning! I’m going to be honest and say I’m not going to read it now, because I’m in a very frustrated state about all the handwringing and nodding of “yes we all must do something” that’s the current standard – I’d swap 10 excellent solutions for one average implementation right now. But I’m about to add it to my wish list.
“Not buying these gee-gaws might take that child out of the factory, but it’s more likely they’ll end up combing trash piles than attending school, so trying to make a little difference may be worse than meaningless without making a big difference too.”
You know, there’s real wisdom in this paragraph even if you don’t realize it.
It’s there deliberately, Marty
There are many things where just not doing bad is good enough (turning off lights you don’t need on, or only eating as much as you need, not as much as you want). But many aspects of trade require us to go an extra step by doing good to replace the bad we stop. Unfortunately that requires empathy and effort, two things that humans are uniquely equipped to not bother with.
You’re still missing it. What goes through my head when you recount the “parable of the toy helicopter” is how amazing it is that we can feed someone on the other side of the world with such a trivial thing.
An interesting perspective – I’d view it rather differently of course, though not in the way you might expect. I’m saddened that buying such absolute crap is the way we feed someone on the other side of the world. To use a test my father likes to invoke, a visiting alien might guess that the purpose of the toy helicopter was to use up the maximum amount of the earth’s resources for the minimum return.
I’m not so sure they would conclude that.