Uh oh, we're screwed!

So my wife and I have been boycotting products made in China since July 2007. We're not sure if this came about because of all the toy recalls in the news or if we just realized that China is a communist country and maybe we shouldn't be supporting them. Either way I guess we shouldn't be supporting them (we don't want our children poisoned and we don't want our children to become communists).

The boycott hasn't been easy, almost everything in every major retail store is made in China. We have had to almost completely suppress our impulse purchasing, which is almost as difficult as doing that rub your belly, pat you head thing, while riding a unicycle over a tightrope. I mean it's called an "impulse purchase" there isn't a lot of advanced notice, it sort of happens, impulsively.

Needless to say we don't laugh at jokes anymore, we tend to mull them over a couple of days before allowing ourselves to find the humor (we're totally not fun at parties either).

But we have managed to find the "must have" products we desired (sarcasm included) made in other countries or better yet here in the U.S. of A!

All was going swimmingly (unless the bathing suit was made in China) until we saw the movie Avatar. We were totally blown away by this movie. We saw it twice in one week. We talked about hiring a muralist to come into our home and paint Pandorian scenes on all of our walls. We took our 6 year old daughter and she too was amazed. "Perfect" I thought! What better way to completely embrace all things Avatar, then through my child. I wouldn't feel comfortable playing with Avatar toys by myself, skipping through the house with a little plastic Jake Sully on the back of a little plastic Banshee, waving my arms up and down while I made high pitched screeching noises.

But playing with my daughter, well that's just what a good father does. What does it matter if the game we're playing involves me taking all the Avatar toys outside while my daughter has to stay in her room and play with the Avatar sticker book? We're still technically playing a game, right? It's just not the most enjoyable game (for her).

So Deb (my wife) and I went to a place neither of us had been since we were kids, Toys-R-Us. It was two days before Christmas and the place reeked of body odor and the toxic fumes from all those plastic toys. We purchase most of our daughter's toys from European toy companies. Most are made of wood and don't contain any toxic chemicals. Call us weirdo hippies, but we don't think toys should be poisonous (not to mention plastic isn't biodegradable).

All of those principles though were about to be tossed under a speeding Hummer on it's way to a baby seal bashing party. We needed those Avatar toys! And we knew they'd no doubt be made in China. And they were.

I watched Deb swipe the card and I imagined her holding a sword and striking me down. Each punch of our debit card pin number, was a punch in my gut. Two years we boycotted, so many needless products we had walked away from. We had dozens of BUY AMERICAN websites bookmarked on the computer. Most of them were small mom and pop companies barely surviving had it not been for truly patriotic Americans like myself and Deb. Sometimes we'd have problems with orders and we could call up the owner of the company and talk with them directly. These people were our friends, our countrymen. What would they think of us now?

We walked to the car barely saying a word to one another. The guilt was dug in like a tick. Like a tick flipping us the bird and calling us commies. "Well" I said, "we're going to have to do something big to get ourselves out of this mess".

While playing with the Avatar toys with my daughter today, it hit me!

For the entire year of 2010 we'll purchase only American made products.

I called Deb at worked, I was so relieved that I had come up with the perfect punishment for breaching our boycott. Not punishment, but a challenge. I don't think most Americans have any idea just how hard it is to find things made in America. The biggest problem is that most Americans just don't even think about it. We make completely uninformed purchases, we have blind faith in the regulators who allowed lead-tainted toys to get into the hands of our children. We just stopped caring about the things we buy. Why care, I guess, when something new will come out in two months making the new/old thing we just bought useless?

We are going to use this blog to keep a record of our BUY AMERICAN in 2010 challenge. We promise to be honest, even though I know most you are probably saying to yourselves "wait, aren't these the two who just broke their boycott of China for Avatar toys?". Yes, we are those two people, we also still made it over two years without buying anything from China, and we lived to write about it! I think a year buying only American made products shouldn't be that hard.......or will it?