Dr. Seuss Meets the CPSIA!
I have been blogging about the Child Protection Safety Initiative Act for a few months now. It went into effect under cover of darkness and was supposedly designed to protect our children from lead poisoning which was a real concern born out of the state of toy making in China. It blossomed as UNTHINKING legislators threw law together with the intent only to make themselves look like they were actually doing something about the problem.
However, instead of requiring testing from toys coming from China or other foreign countries, the law requires every product manufactured for children 12 and under to go through rigorous and expensive testing in order to be compliant. This included things that were never known to contain lead or other harmful elements like clothing and books. In fact, originally, it required testing of each lot. So if you were a used clothing store, you would have to test each individual garment in order to be compliant!
Fortunately, most THINKING people knew this was bad law which would put many small businesses OUT of business and they have been successful in getting many exceptions added to the law. It is impossible for them to enforce anyway, but it may take several years before it is all ironed out. You see, instead of just scrapping the bad law and rewriting it in a less confusing and restrictive way, they will do what most politicians do and throw lots more words at the law and hope that the good words will cancel out the bad words and, in the end, the ones that stick will make sense!
The Lord put a great deal of creativity in the hearts of His children and when they are justifiably outraged, they can be quite creatively humorous. Currently there are a few YouTube videos dealing with this issue. One is of a Faux Senator who explains how difficult his job is NOT to read all the laws that come to him for his signature each week.
And then there is this adorable social commentary by Heather Idoni of Homeschooler's Notebook. She and a friend wrote Dr. Seuss Meets the CPSIA. They have also issued a challenge to all you creative writers out there who love Dr. Seuss to come up with your own social commentary on a subject near and dear to you in the style of Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss).
If you want to try your hand here, please post a comment with a few Dr. Seuss-like lines.
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Due to CPSIA I recently took some pre-1985 books off my children’s resale store shelves Several of them were Dr. Seuss books. See http://cpsia2008.blogspot.com for my photo of a Dr. Seuss book (Fox in Socks) where on the first page it says “Take it Slowly … This book is DANGEROUS!” That guy was ahead of his time.