If you really want to, you can

Sometimes Caleb (my son) still struggles with the concept of sleeping, and more specifically with sleeping at the same time his parents are sleeping. Therefore, I somewhat often find myself bouncing on an exercise ball with him dozing in my arms and watching whatever happens to be on TV, for lack of anything else to occupy my mind at the time. I was doing this the other night and caught the Tonight Show. Jay was doing his monologue. He did a bit about the lead paint from China (I don't remember what the punch line was, but I'm sure it was full of wit) and as the audience was finishing up their laughter, the guitar guy (Kevin?) remarks that we should just make this stuff here in America. This elicited a big round of applause from the crowd. Strangely though, it was definitely the kind of applause that signals agreement, but resignation to the fact that that which is being agreed upon as good will never be...like when people applaud a speech about how money shouldn't decide an election, or how nice it would be for everyone in the world to have enough to eat every day.

This struck me as odd. In no other place do we, as individual consumers in a capitalist economy have more influence than in the marketplace. If you, as a consumer would like more goods to be made in the U.S., stop buying goods made elsewhere. In fact, I'd be willing to wager that if everyone who saw that show and agreed with Kevin's statement were to stop buying things manufactured in China and sold in Wal-Mart, and were to buy only American good from the same store, you could get a fair amount of manufacturing moved back to the U.S. in a few years. Here's the catch though (and there's always a catch), you're going to have to pay a lot more for your stuff, and you might even have to go to a few different stores to get everything you need. You might also have to sacrifice some things like movies and eating out.

I suppose this is the point though, that it's a lot easier to agree with a notion in principal, and even to applaud it as worthy of support, but then to quickly point out to yourself that it's completely impractical for you personally to actually execute such a principal in your own life. It does make one feel good to agree with something that is right, but it's somewhat frustrating to find people who are doing only that when they could with a small amount of effort actually contribute to the change of direction they claim to desire.

Caleb at four months

I think it's probably time for an update to the son's pic on here. Caleb at about four months.