All The Stuff I Was Going to Say

I was going to rant and rave at you all today.

I was going to bitch and moan about the latest mass toy recall from the China Poison Train, as it's being called. I was going to vent about being sick and tired of feeling like I need to use one of those lead test swabs from Home Depot on every damned thing in my house, from the windowsills (they're fine) to our lunchboxes (they weren't) to our toys (I'm scared to check, quite honestly. I fear a future with sticks and rocks from the backyard filling our toybox.).

And then I was going to yell a bit about cheap toys vs. safe toys and say that given the opportunity to choose, most parents in this country would opt for the latter, even if it means the eighth Dora toy in the house costs $1 more for a big ole' MADE IN THE USA sticker. Course, from there, I'd start in about how people in this country are too high and mighty to work on assembly lines making Elmo drums and Diego houses...which then leads to a discussion of why we have such an immigrant "problem" around here (Have you heard Mencia do his bit about Mexican factory workers and their zeal for doing so-called menial jobs? The man is a genius.), and why I doubt we could get plastic figurines and painted trains from anywhere but China even if we wanted to. And this would lead to a discussion about this article from the Washington Post this morning (I was going to link it but now it's vanished, which makes me remember how much I hate the stupid new design of washingtonpost.com, but that's a whole 'nother rant for another day), that said most teenagers in our area are saving up for $300 purses and $200 sunglasses for school this year, and our general sense of entitlement and I-need-it-yesterday-ism, and how that's all being fostered at home to overcome some sort of parenting guilt that's become pervasive since we stopped disciplining our children and taking responsibility for our own actions without blaming previous generations or inadequate healthcare or the fact that we don't WANT to make our own damn toys for $7 an hour and we'd rather collect "assistance" and sit on our arses watching the Redskins lose on somebody else's dime.

I was going to talk about the ridiculousness of having to worry that my kids might be poisoned by the very things I hope will entertain them, and how I feel like a moron locking up my dish detergent so they can't get to that when the fact is that Thomas and Dora are frying their brains with their mere presence in our house. And I was going to finish up by saying that somebody needs to start a severe letter writing campaign to the CEOs of these companies and demand that they start upping their product safety testing before this shit hits the shelf at Target and that we really truly will pay more if it means we can end this recall nonsense sometime in the near future. And the other thought was that somebody else should start a series of class-action lawsuits against these companies and hold them accountable for the crap they're selling us instead of letting them just blindly buy whatever's easiest to sell and ship it here without a second thought.

That's what I was going to talk about today. But I decided you'd probably blow me off as a raving lunatic and fascist, and stop reading my little blog, and that would break my literary heart right in two.

So instead, I'm going to tell you how totally thrilling it was to budget my whole morning to spend in line at the MVA renewing my drivers license only to find that the whole entire process took 10 minutes.

And then I'm going to go drown my anger and pent-up rage at this whole toy situation in an ice cream sandwich. Which means that in about three weeks, I'll be ranting that my stupid dresses don't fit.

You've been warned.