We love cheap stuff! We love it so much that we’re perfectly willing to let people in different countries (as long as they  have different coloured skin) work in places we wouldn’t even walk through – places like the ones we striked to outlaw 50 years ago, for wages that were so horrible that we fought and got shot in the head to raise 60 years ago, and for hours that we deemed inhumane and unjust 70 years ago.

And then, when we get products that are filled with unsafe and dangerous substances that we outlawed 80 years ago, WE’RE FUCKING SURPRISED OR SOMETHING.

The problem is that as far as we’re concerned it’s totally worth the environmental destruction of countries we’ll probably never go to, in working conditions we’ll never have to imagine, so that we can save a few dollars on something that we’ll discard the next time we clean house. Why? Well, we tell ourselves that white people had to go through shitty living conditions too. Fair is fair! Development isn’t free!

Suffering is just what these people should expect if they want to work their way into the first world!

(Of course, it’s bullshit. By the time they get there, there won’t be anything left.)

It’s all because of a syndrome I’ve decided to call “retroactive entitlement,” where we attempt to justify the suffering of others in the name of some long-discredited puritan work ethic. Because now, it seems, people my age believe that it wasn’t actually really wrong to make white people work in horrific conditions for low wages back then, because it has paid for our current late-model automobiles and the roads upon which we drive them. This is what we as smarter, more moral people are entitled to, by having been the children of the people who suffered.

So look at it this way, everybody whose children have been chewing on cadmium-infested teethers: by ignoring workplace standards, by ignoring health and safety product warnings, and by manufacturing things that are full of dangerous – but cheap! – substances, the Chinese are earning their children’s Priuses. It’s not wrong; it’s progress!