The Warstation
I don’t often come away from reading a Playstation article feeling melancholy, but this is kind of sobering. It’s from Toward Freedom, a site that takes a “progressive perspective on world events. For the tl; dr challenged at home, here it is: children were forced to mine rare metals used in the production of Playstation 2 consoles.
From TowardFreedom.com:
Tantalum is used to make cell phones, laptops and other electronics made, for example, by SONY, a multi-billion dollar multinational based in Japan that manufactures the iconic PlayStation, a video game console. And while allegations of plundering coltan from a nation in desperate need of revenue seem bad enough, the UN also discovered that Rwandan troops and rebels were using prisoners-of-war and children to mine for the “black gold.”
“Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms,” said British politician Obona King, who was a Member of Parliament from 1997 to 2005.
This isn’t a blame piece towards Sony (which, as I understand it, does not use illegally mined coltan for Playstation 3 or PSP manufacturing). The jab at American and European kids killing imaginary aliens is a bit mean-spirited. Why should kids be expected to know what goes on in countries they were fortunate enough not to be born into? It’s not like we tell them when we cave into their demands and buy them mountains of ill-conceived toys and electronics.
Even if we did tell them, what could we expect them to do? Say some kind of Grace before turning on the system? Would they connect their toys with the suffering of other children their age? Or would they keep on playing with maybe one or two throwaway thoughts for the dark side of the system’s assembly? I vote the latter.
Stories like this make me sad because it reminds us how little we know about the world. Maybe we can be blamed for it, and maybe we can’t; we’re extremely fortunate to live in countries where the purchase of a Playstation is possible, but we all still struggle. We struggle to pay rent, buy food. Occasional video games are a treat with most families, especially with the economy swirling down the toilet like it is. A family of four with a breadwinner who was crippled in an accident—with no medical insurance—is not in a good position on any country on earth.
Life is rough all over. I wish it wasn’t, but there you go. Is there really a right way to deal with the injustice of the world besides feeling helpless and possibly donating to crooked charities?
WHY SO SERIOUS??
Yeah, I know. Here’s a funny word to balance things out: “ananas.” It means “pineapple” in French. When I was a kid, I used to watch a show called Telefrancais. Its mascot was Ananas. Here, why don’t you become an honourary Canadian.
