Ok, I realize I am a bit late to the incensed rants about the endless toy recalls, but as this morning’s first sip of steaming coffee passed my lips I heard the announcement for yet another Mattel Toy Recall. I mean come on, it’s taking me back to the lightning-fast fall of Britney Spears as she drank and stumbled her way to that fateful shaving incident, her eyes dead and an entire nation riveted.
Do we not see the same downward spiral with our society?
The news piece said that lead paint is used because it makes the paint dry faster, speeding production time. It also makes the products shinier, appealing to kids. So, we want everything quicker and cheaper. We want our toys, and people for that matter, shinier and newer.
What happened to fascinating? Friends, toys and idols being chosen for the ways that they challenged and delighted us? Are we really so obsessed with the outside of things that we are willing to put chemicals in produce to make them shine, inject chemicals into our lips to make them plump, implant foreign substances into our breasts to make them pert, fuel milk production in cows with hormones that pass to the milk we drink, allow mysterious injections in meat, and abide the continued use of poison in toys?
 Where have our souls gone? Are they being tossed out with wrinkles and imagination? Childhood and creativity? Can we get back to a place that allows entertainment to come from simpler things, the wisdom and wit that springs from the youngest mouths, rather than the humiliating, stammering of a young woman, painted and primped to perfection, but steered too far from anything but her own reflection?
Maybe it’s time to look in the mirror. Let’s take stock of our priorities. Let’s not be afraid to speak up, particularly in the times when our opinion will not be the shiniest, or the plumpest. Our positions will be gnarly and dense and laid bare alongside the polished and canned, but it will be ours that will sustain our children through bitter winters and times that pretty smiles and shiny hair will be nothing but trappings of another time.
Let’s reclaim our souls, and, in doing so, the future of our children. It’s time.
