America’s addiction to foreign oil is kids’ stuff compared to her addiction to cheap plastic crap.
As damage to the gulf ecosystem caused by 112 days of BP-related arrogance ebbs away from our collective consciousness, we again blindly accept China’s insidious crusade to pollute the US economy with our own dependence on their shoddily-made, toxic exports. Tar balls are small potatoes compared to the unlimited buffet of product and food contaminants lapping onto our shores inside those tightly-packed shipping containers from points deep within the former silk route.
How polluted by the Chinese are we? Enough to casually put our kids’ lives at risk almost every day. We strap our babies into faulty Chinese-made child carriers and portable swings that entrap them or drop them out, resulting in over 60 injuries last year. We assemble their cribs squinting at the incomprehensible, poorly-translated instructions then wonder why the little nippers trap their heads, feet and hands, then fall out. We buy the munchkins Easy-Bake Ovens that trap their fingers and sear their retinas from staring at the bulb. That cute squeaky Armadillo toy inside the book “Hot Plate Heaven at the Fat Chance Hotel” dislodges and parks in the baby’s trachea the second our back is turned.
We pollute our own homes with similar crap. During the blistering Richmond summer we move stagnant air with oscillating fans containing faulty Mandarin wiring that causes smoke damage, inhalation and fires. We equip our above-ground pool with a rickety pot metal ladder that resulted in over 127 reported injuries last year. Dad builds the pool deck using a circular saw with a faulty guard that leaves his fingertips on the decking and him screaming to the ER.
We warm our bedroom during the winter with oil-filled space heaters that huff and puff and burn our house down. That bedroom lamp that we have to jiggle to turn on may be one of 1,500 that contained a defective switch that can electrocute, and if it’s plugged into one of those ramshackle power strips it could shock us first before starting a fire.
The most current poisonous poltergeist living in our house is defective Chinese drywall. During the housing construction boom from 2004 to 2006, builders in Florida and Louisiana imported 550 million pounds of the inexpensive, sulfur-spewing, air conditioner-corroding wallboard. Today there are four class-action lawsuits in four states against the construction companies and the drywall manufacturers who used these defective materials imported from questionable Chinese gypsum mines.
Nauseated, sniffling and teary-eyed homeowners in Florida, especially – already hammered by plummeting home prices – are seeing their values tumble even more because of the tainted sheetrock, and are being forced out before they die too young especially by Florida standards. Removing the deadly sheetrock and replacing it takes about 6 months.
After a hard day of stripping sheetrock, having his fingers sewn back on by a slack-jawed Obamacare intern and beating out electrical fires dad should be careful as he relaxes in his recalled heated massaging recliners – he may find himself an overstuffed baked potato after it overheats and smolders him into unconsciousness.
In the mood to crash your car? Chinese tire makers are eager to help out. In 2007 a half-million tires were imported by a New Jersey company from the Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber company, made without a gum strip that keeps the tread from separating. The result was untold blowouts and accidents before they were all recalled. We also may have pumped those shoddy tires up with General Tso’s air pump that tended to explode at normal pressures, causing 13 reported injuries in 2008.
Feeling hungry? Even fans of the most sumptuous Chinese buffets may be less comforted that food manufacturers are happily importing tons of cheap, semi-edible taste-flavored food products from questionable Chinese wholesalers for resale, some including such delicacies of the deep as scrod, mud skippers and anglerfish.
Are your extremities going numb? Maybe that delicious-looking Monkfish in your grocer’s freezer was actually a toxic pufferfish. Feel your airway closing yet? Maybe it was that deadly poisonous frozen eel that slithered into a bag of fish sticks. Bear in mind also while you’re chowing down on potentially poisonous breaded blowfish that only 45% of China has access to sewage-treatment facilities, and the Chinese discharge 3.7 billion tons of sewage in their lakes, rivers and waterways annually as they happily over-fish, package and ship stateside. Bon appetite!
If the American government and citizens reacted to the inundation of our retail shelves with defective Chinese detritus the way they reacted to the despoiling of the gulf by the Deepwater Horizon oil it would go a long way to restoring mercantile sanity in a world gone stupid. I have not seen volunteers in orange spacesuits in the Walmart aisles, picking up and bagging stray packing peanuts that washed out from under the shelves, nor have I seen the President visiting a Big Lots and commenting that despite the crap on the shelves, the store is “open and ready for business”.
Perhaps we should stop being so blinded by bargains that we would be willing to keep one more American at work by spending a few extra bucks on our own plastic crap rather than the imported kind.
Meanwhile, pray that those microwaved fish sticks were caught upstream from the treatment plant.
