It started with a paper cut

Reaching for a book this morning, I caught the edge with the tip of my finger and came away with a paper cut. Bled like a stuck pig, as we colorful southerners like to say.

After bandaging my wound, it became obvious that I’d have difficulty typing on my computer with a damaged digit. My entire livelihood depends on my fingers flying over a keyboard like winged Mercury. This could very well be a career-ending injury.

Pain, of course, is subjective, but I can assure it has been excruciating. My convalescent period is going to be long and arduous.

Inconceivably, not a single warning label about the terrible dangers of razor-sharp paper can be found anywhere on the offending book, despite the long and well-known history of paper-related injuries in industrialized nations. Why has the Consumer Product Safety Commission been silent on this killer in our midst?

Every day, thousands of little school children suffer disfiguring injuries while practicing their alphabets and sums. Why haven’t we heard an outcry of horror from the NEA, that noble guardian of our precious children?

I think I know the answer. Big Paper has your congressperson and the unions in its back pocket.

In 2005, the most recent year for which data is available, the US government consumed enough paper to cover the entire surface of the earth to a depth of 4.5 feet!* Big Paper and Big Government got into bed during the New Deal, and their tawdry affair has continued through every administration and Congress since.

Which is why you will not find a single, solitary label on any paper product warning consumers of the dangers they face. Can there be any doubt where our politicians’ loyalties lie? The smell of payoffs is as pungent as an Alabama pulp mill.

I called Murry, my brother-in-law the attorney-at-law, and he thinks we can get ourselves a 7-figure judgment if this thing goes to a jury. Once we put a little six-year old on the stand, her fingers already scarred and crippled from the daily assaults of unsafe paper, we’ll have the jury eating out of our hands!

Holy cow! I just realized why the newspapers haven’t been grilling Hillary and Barack about their links to Big Paper! This thing is way bigger than I thought!!

I just noticed a black, Georgia-Pacific panel truck idling across the street, and I’m sure it wasn’t there yesterday. I’d better post this while I can.

Watch your backs, my friends. Big Paper plays for keeps.

*Wild guess based on any number of dubious assumptions. The government actually has no idea how much paper it uses.

Photo credit: stock.xchng