I remember a stressed-out co-worker once telling me, “The only thing that holds me together is static cling!”
He meant it as a joke, but as I recall his shaky career, it was more like a prognosis.
In any event, I’ve come to the unhappy conclusion that static cling is everywhere in our modern American society. It goes by many different names, but they all come down to one insidious culprit: hermetically sealed plastic wrapping.
Plastic has become a symbol of America’s current fixation with security. It has coiled itself around virtually ever facet of daily life, from airport checkpoints to drugstore display counters to supermarket merchandising; it may even tell us something about the eroding bravado of a graying population that prizes safety over risk.
Now if you think this complaint about plastic wrapping sounds overstated, just try these simple experiments:
– Try peeling open and then applying one of those sheer-strip finger bandages. Thumbs have not yet been evolved small and agile enough to do this without digital disaster.
– Try peeling off the skin-tight wrap of a package of frozen meat, a fresh-baked box of desserts, the safety tab around a carton of milk, the bag inside a box of cereal or cookies, a packet of mustard at the ballpark, one of those insanely sanitized bars of soap and especially those indestructible seals on a CD or DVD.
– If you really like a challenge, try any over-the-counter medicine product. Ever since the Tylenol scare, the pharmaceutical industry must have invested almost as many millions in protection as it has in research.
Maybe this obsession with plastic security is a reflection of our society’s obsession with national security. Or is it the other way around? I’m not sure. All I am sure of is that hermetically sealed plastic rules my world.
It defiantly stares at me from around my morning newspaper on the wet driveway and from my weekly dry-cleaning at the laundry. From those armor-designed packs of drugstore batteries to those eat-me-if-you-can-ever-open-me candy bars and restaurant butter pads. Not to mention those impossible-to-tear, security-sealed parcel-post deliveries.
There’s just no way to really defeat this plastic–no way through it, no way around it. Only humble submission to its powers to intimidate as it contemptuously looms there between me and the objects of my desire.
