Save handmade toys from indiscriminate regulation

This year I picked up a few sets of these adorable felt-board-ready story-telling images from crafter DJ, of Nodin's Nest on etsy.com. I'm really looking forward to giving them to Thomas and watching his imagination run wild with them.

These are the Pirate and Food sets; I also have a Tea Party set floating around in the Christmas box somewhere. Besides these, DJ sells Christmas ornaments, soft stuffed toys which are whimsical and delightful (there are stuffed tea sets!), and some other unusual things. Go check them out and buy something, because starting in February, DJ's home-based business may be illegal. That's when a new law goes into effect which requires that all toys be batch-labeled and independently tested:

The United States Congress rightly recognized that the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) lacked the authority and staffing to prevent dangerous toys from being imported into the US. So, they passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) in August, 2008. Among other things, the CPSIA bans lead and phthalates in toys, mandates third-party testing and certification for all toys and requires toy makers to permanently label each toy with a date and batch number.

All of these changes will be fairly easy for large, multinational toy manufacturers to comply with. Large manufacturers who make thousands of units of each toy have very little incremental cost to pay for testing and update their molds to include batch labels.

For small American, Canadian, and European toymakers, however, the costs of mandatory testing will likely drive them out of business. [From the Handmade Toy Alliance website]

Thinking about this law in the context of DJ's lovely sets reveals how incredibly idiotic it is. These things are paper; what's great about her work is the fun images she's found, the bright colored cardstock they're on, and the fact that they come in collections that have variety and continuity. They can't be batch tested; each piece is unique. So they'll be impossible to sell once the new law goes into effect -- even though they contain no more dangerous chemicals than Thomas's books or Wild Animal Baby magazine.

This blog is entirely devoted to photos of more unique toys that will be unsellable in the US after the new law goes into effect, and this page tells you some things you can do to help make sure the law is revised to exempt small, safe toy manufacturers. So go follow a link or two.

On the election

All day, and contrary to my general hopelessness and resulting reticence about the political realm, I've been thinking about the possibility of Obama becoming my next president -- and my first president: not only the first one I ever actually voted for, but the first one that I thought would care about my opinions.

I have been thinking, with awe and gratitude, about the enormous victory this is for the soul of the American people, in finally electing a black president. For several weeks now I've been reflecting on this powerful symbol that racism and intolerance might have an expiration date. What I realized today is the incredible sign this represents for the enfranchisement of the other disenfranchised people in this country: the young, the poor, the disillusioned.

Through his incredible speaking, his campaign's commitment to and dependence on broad-based and personal appeals, and most of all through his real faith in the American people, Obama has inspired millions of people like me who were not only apathetic about, but actually hostile to politics and its power. Certainly his election is only the beginning of the change I can believe in -- but it does give me hope.

I find this videoto be, oddly, an epitome of what this campaign means for the future: it's a hack, a mashup of a mashup of a speech; it's shared on youtube. It was unsolicited, done by a bunch of young people merely because they wanted to, because they'd been inspired, and in turn it's inspired thousands more people. It's genuinely inspiring because they were genuinely inspired; it's a creative response, not merely politics according to the usual patterns. It's making a difference.

Somehow, somewhere in his past, Barack Obama got the idea that if he channeled his inspiration with thought and energy, instead of following the usual patterns, he could change this country and possibly the world. Now he's passing that on to millions.

If politics doesn't have to be as usual, maybe I can change my patterns too. In the future, I'm going to try to participate in the process not just by voting, but by looking for opportunities to motivate minds and hearts. Whatever differences in policy Americans may have, I hope we can all agree on that change.