parenting

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. I try to avoid cheap plastic toys and yet my house is filled with them. I have parents and in-laws that will still buy them too much stuff, there's birthday party goodie bags, etc. Throwing it away doesn't help the environment and charity stores don't want most of it (can't blame them). It's both a quantity and quality issue for me. It reminds me of when Marx talks about how distant societies cannot avoid capitalism - it's a global system that must expand everywhere. It feels like amassing all these plastic toys feels on some level like an extension of that; constantly expanding commodity production that has to go somewhere, environmental degradation be damned.