I've just read the response to my last entry from Alison who gave me a very interesting website to help get more information on what is enough.
http://www.enough.org.uk/
I guess every day is teaching lessons in choice, responsibility and impact.
I think what made me so sad in Cambodia was that many markets were pandering to the tourists' need for cheap copies of 'luxury goods' such as LV handbags and CK t-shirts. They think that we just want logo after logo, and the demand is definitely there for it. Instead of buying the truly beautiful traditional silks and local craftwork that would help this destroyed nation grow and thrive AND maintain it's cultural heritage, travellers insist on buying cheap and nasty copies of luxury goods as their souvenirs. I guess it's just a small reflection of a greater problem.
2 comments:
You are right. Along with logos, we are bombarded with images that ignite our sense of desire, and encourage us to consume. We feel safe because we are buying into an image that we know. We feel safe because we believe that in buying and wearing brands, we can be in control of the image we project. We become part of that label's tribe.
Whether we are shopping for high fashion items or food, the branding and profile of the company influences us hugely. Society (dominated as it is nowadays by commercial interests and influences) teaches us to beleve we need stuff- and designers and marketers want it to be their stuff. Commerce would crumble if we all realised how many of the things we consume in truck loads we don't actually need but have been trained to want. Or maybe it wouldn't- maybe it would just shift focus and just work harder at delivering the simple things we do need, in enviromentally economical ways. Their selling points would not be based on how up-to-the- minute and fashionable they are, but how environmentally responsible they are. Cars would again last a family 30 years, furniture would be bought and sold based on how well it will stand the test of time, how well it can be passed down through the generations. Jeans wouldn't change every season, leading us to think our flares from two years ago need to be replaced with stove pipes. We'd all just buy a couple of pairs of non-descript ones, and wear them until they fell apart.
We'd stop thinking we need to buy bigger and better plasma televisions and begin putting our money into projects to deliver better health care to places where preventable diseases still kill babies in the thousands.
I'm beginning to hear the chorus of John Lennon's 'Imagine' coming on.
I'll get down off my soapbox now...
Alison
Your comments about the T Shirts in Cambodia reminded me of a surreal shopping experience in Thailand. I had been travelling for months and needed a new T Shirt.
I tried for hours to buy a T Shirt that had no logo - it wasnt a political stance just a longstanding dislike of being a human billboard.
It wasnt possible to buy a T Shirt without a logo. In the end I bought one that had some unknown Chinese characters on it.
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