UK: Bring Back ‘Make Do and Mend’ Spirit to Prevent £140m Worth of Clothes in Landfill Every Year, Campaigner Urges
2nd September 2019
Okay, I’ll bite: Why is that a bad thing?
Sure, I dislike seeing useful things go to waste as much as anybody. But I don’t become a ‘campaigner’ about it. In my experience, people who can be described as ‘campaigners’ specialize in hectoring other people about how they ought to live their lives, always in favor of what the ‘campaigner’ would prefer. I have a name for such people and it isn’t ‘campaigner’.
We live in glorious times, in which prosperity is sufficiently widespread that more and more people can throw clothes away rather than pinch and scrimp and save and make do the way that poor people do. Of course, to Certain People that’s unfortunate. They’d rather all of us live like poor people, even if we’re not.
Cars are too convenient; we need to use bicycles and trains. Airplanes are too convenient; we need to use trains and … wishful thinking, I suppose. (I’m waiting for Tesla to come out with an Electric Horse. The Left Coast will go crazy.)