Colorful rain boots

They are everywhere this year; colorful rubber rain boots.
The young women wear them, for Fashion tells them so.

Fashion, that mysterious and demanding cabal,has announced in the relentless and monotonous tone of mass advertising, which assaults the senses though television, large posters with perpetually smiling teenagers on them, and that most nefarious and destructive of all media - the magazines-, that the children’s rain boots of my youth are now mandatory dress for the adult votaries of retail.

The patterns and colors on the boots are so multitudinous that I can’t recall having seen the same pair twice.

When I see a woman scampering by, with nervous little feet clad in these rubber ephemera, a vague impression of sadness and loathing comes over me.
They all fork out $ 100.00 for the illusion of individual choice by picking a whirly design in black and white or a floral pattern of yellow and orange.

Because of the work I do I know a thing or two about the travels that the rubber boots make from the factory in Qingdao or Shenzhen, stuffed in ocean containers and dropped off at the distribution centers in the US, from which they are shipped to the stores.

They cost less than $ 20.00 when they arrive at the stores, and that is including all the transportation charges and import duties and the salaries of all the many hands that are involved in carrying this precious cargo to its destination.

This is how money is made now, after it was decided by the captains of industry that they’d be better off when poor people elsewhere made all our stuff.
They could always find pompous morons like Thomas Friedman to declare that the outsourcing of our jobs was actually a good thing for us.

The young women, who for some reason never seem to look at ease, do not contemplate these minor unpleasant details.
They are, after all, successful members of society and this proud fact must be broadcast via clothing, footwear and various electronic accoutrements.

Conform Obey Consume

If you want to go through life like a mindless consumer slave, be my guest.
But don’t pretend that you still have an iota of originality or sense of identity left by picking a colorful design for your fashionable rubber rain boots.