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Ever see those videos late at night for collectible plates or commemorative coin sets? Who in the lame invented those? What kind of thrill seeker is sitting at home pining for a plate featuring famous presidents, mountain wildlife or religious icons? Don't get me started about Precious Moments Figurines. Those things are awful.
We live in a capitalist society. That means free enterprise rules our market system. Don't quote me. I'm not an economist, but I understand the basics of how economics, the hardest of the soft sciences, works.
People need dishes of some sort to eat off of. They could probably be considered a necessity. Some weirdo comes along and paints a sad clown on a gravy bowl and says that the bowl is now a collector's item. Most of us would not tolerate this behavior.
"Hey. Why'd you ruin a perfectly good bowl with that clown picture? Sheesh," we'd say. But someone, and I'm not naming names, believes that this plate is a collector's item and collects it. Soon a whole society of plate collectors has created a demand for plates with bizarre pictures on them. After that, companies spring up to fill the demand of collectible plates, and then they go out and gather pigments and mine materials to create these plates that have no intrinsic value and are not used as items of necessity.
Why do we tolerate this behavior? This, to me, is worse than the oil industry. At least people drive oil-burning cars to accomplish tasks of social or occupational importance. These plates are shipped across the country for no other purpose than to supply an artificially created demand. This is a travesty. Think of how many worthless objects like this exist? This kind of stuff is destroying our planet as fast as anything.
The next time you see your grandmother eyeing chicken-and-rooster salt and pepper shakers, you need to tell her NO! and mean it.
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