One Nation Under Foreign Produced Crap

In the interest of full disclosure: I'm writing this in the middle of a lake. After drinking three Labbatt Blues. While being paid to do so. No, I haven't bought an island villa with the cash I rake in from this self-indulgent little wankfest of weblogginess; I work in retail. Right now I sit on a ferry, in a gift shop, next to a cash register full of green paper that people handed me in exchange for T-shirts made from bleached and dyed cotton and assembled by Malaysian toddlers. (All while listening to Animal Collective and ignoring prospective customers, my right, my duty to do so boiling over with each Baudrillard quote I absorb: "[Americans] are themselves simulation in its most developed state, but they have no language in which to describe it, since they themselves are the model. As a result, they are the ideal material for an analysis of all the possible variants of the modern world. No more and no less in fact than were primitive societies in their day. The same mythical and analytic excitement that made us look towards those earlier societies today impels us to look in the direction of America. With the same passion and the same prejudices.")
The image of impoverished children being exploited to satisfy our insatiable glut for souvenirs (artifacts, made objects to remember our lives by) is horrifying (unless of course you take into account that 13 cents a day is more than they'd be making otherwise!). But there's a sickening element to the flip side of this exchange that often remains off the radar. And is arguably the the driving force behind all the terror in the world.
Three girls, about seven or eight years old, all dressed in various shades of pink, all with long hair and all covered in sparkles, came up to exchange their parents' money for various cheaply made toys manufactured somewhere in Asia. One child decided not to buy a squishy dino, then shouted to her mother, "I want to spend my money!" Her mother responded quietly, "You'll be able to spend your money on the other side." (of the ferry's landing.)
Here we have a twisted little route of goods production and consumption: people produce cheap crap on the other side of the world, make no money doing so and wonder what the hell those Americans are going to do with a stuffed duck in a raincoat that looks like an alligator. Little kid sees said good, wants it, begs parent for it, gets it, then subconsciously wonders what the hell she will do with a duck dressed like an alligator, and wonders why it fails to complete her life.
Nonetheless, the stuffed duck incident repeats itself throughout the child's life, who then grows into a person and believes that material goods pave the road to happiness. That appetite fuels the production source, by which many more lives will be consumed in the pursuit of production.
Bottom line: any parent who wouldn't want their kid working in a sweatshop shouldn't purchase stuff produced in one, and further, any parent who doesn't want their kid growing up to be a vacant human being shouldn't buy them worthless crap to shut them up.
(And admittedly, anyone who finds the whole process repulsive probably shouldn't get paid to be part of the problem. But hey, hypocrisy is one of the most inevitable trappings of modern American life, a beautifully complex sequence of instant gratification and the following sense of anticlimactic disappointment.)