| Jan. 4th, 2009 @ 09:33 pm Lead: Your Friend |
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The CPSIA has been in the back of my mind for awhile now, but I think it was this article in the LA Times that kind of drove it home for me when a customer emailed me the link asking if we were going to be out of business on February 10 (coincidentally, my birthday). I cheerfully replied that we'll be fine, but I seriously wonder.
What we have, kids, is legislation that is so stupid on its face that I'm just flabbergasted. I'm just really bent about this on so many levels that it's difficult for me to articulate. While I understand that lead is a not-so-good thing, I also realize that it's been a problem for centuries, and, in my lifetime alone, lead has moved from a ubiquitous presence to nearly non-existent as far as serious threats to children's health go. According to Wikipedia: "In 1978 there were 13.5 million children in the United States with elevated blood lead levels (i.e., 10µg/dl). By 2002, that number had dropped to 310,000 children."
In essence, while little is really known about lead and its effects, some diligent efforts in the last 30-years have reduced the threat by incredible leaps. It has, essentially, become almost a non-issue. But there it is, your government wants to protect you from another boogey-man.
I honestly don't know how legislation like this even gets started. I understand how it passes, how it gets signed; after all, no one wants to be considered "pro-lead." But seriously, where does this hysteria start? The only answer seems to be found in the root of the word itself---hysteria. Like MADD, there's some group of upset moms in this world who demand that every child born should face no ill affects of living whatsoever.
Apparently, the catalyst for this legislation was a series of recalls, by the CPSC last year, of some Chinese manufactured children's toys that had been found to contain some lead paint. Fine. Like any diligent business owner, we follow the recall notifications and remove the items from the shelf (in this case, we didn't have any). But, how we get from simply recalling the occasional exceptions to the outright banishment of children's clothing as a hazardous substance, until it's proven by manufacturers and retailers to be safe, is a complete mystery and is so utterly irresponsible of congress and the president that I'm left speechless.
When I was a young lad in the sixties, things like seat-belts were an option---you had to ask the car dealer to install them if the car wasn't already equipped. Mom & dad drove around in 2-ton behemoths of metal with bench seats, huge steering wheels and unpadded dashboards. A child seat was designed more for child-control rather than safety, and was just a bunch of metal tubes with a flimsy chair that one could hang over the back seat to keep their restless children from getting up to no good. I spent the better part of my childhood climbing around in the car as if it were a jungle-gym, completely oblivious to the fact that a mere fender-bender could have turned me into a deadly projectile. In fact, by today's standards, where my eight-year old son still needs to sit in a booster-chair and must, by law, wear a helmet while riding his bike in the neighborhood, you'd think that we kids of the sixties had miraculously defied certain death just by crawling out of bed in the morning. During my entire first 16-years, I only recall two neighborhood kids that had suffered serious injury, neither of them fatal nor crippling, but both due to stupidity, and one other kid that died while riding a dirt-bike, and he was considered an expert rider.
And now, despite the fact that almost all lead poisoning is caused by inhalation of tainted dust particles, I face the very real possibility of losing my business, my livelihood, and the one and only asset that I have that breaks me even financially during the reign of Bush and leaves me approximately where I was on January 19, 2001. My home, my retirement, my future, completely gone. All because some kid choked on a button that was later found to contain lead.
Happy birthday to me, I guess. |
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