I try but I'm not perfect
Nike was no obstacle to overcome - I've never worn sports clothes so I was effectively already boycotting them.
"How long will it be before we recognise that we will be more secure when the rest of the world doesn't live in poverty so we can have cheap sneakers?" (Anon, 2001)
Corporate fast food was fairly easy to give up. I became vegetarian at the age of 19 so that fairly well cut down my options anyways. Then one day I decided that I was only going to purchase food while out from mum and pop stores - I haven't regretted it - the food is ten times better, the service friendlier, the extra wait dealable.
Unfortunately on occasions I still drink coke. If I'm at TAFE and I've had a full day of work before hand I sometimes drink it when I don't feel like coffee. At a bar I will still drink a scotch and coke (most have it in those hose things).
I'm not happy with myself at all about this. Coke is one of the fucking worst companys around on this planet. Besides wasting billions of dollars on advertising while millions still starve (and what large company doesn't do this?) they have been known to hire death squads to kill unionists in South America. They were also recently were successfully sued by some Indian (India) women who had to walk miles every day to gather water after coke took over the towns drinking supply in order to taint it with their shitty murderous drink.
If I purchase soft drink at a supermarket I usually just buy the no brand ones, if you check the bottles, coke and pepsi own nearly all of the soft drinks. If I can help it fuck giving either of those cunts money.
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While I'll admit I do let things slide (what choice do you have besides moving to a hippy commune - most companys are inherantly evil), I am usually pretty decent at being an ethical consumer.
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When I saw Jello Biafra do spoken word in Sydney he advised people not to jump right into the extremist side of things as some people can get too intensely into everything and then swing the completely opposite way a few years later in frustration at the lack of world change. He recommended that just making small changes in your life like not buying coke on a particular day is a good step in the right direction. I think it was pretty good advice...
I found a similar quote from him in an interview so here it is-
"JB: I don't want to put it in black and white fundamentalist terms where it's like the more radical-then-thou are the only people who are doing right, and if you don't do as much as I do you're against everything, I mean, that's bullshit. It turns people off to good ideas as badly as fundamentalist Christians do. I mean, there's fundamentalist radicals, fundamentalist punks, fundamentalist vegans, I think we all know a few of that. Fundamentalism is poison. So, we do what we can and doing something is better then doing nothing. But it also means picking up actions and a life style you can live with and live up to, instead of something that makes you miserable to the point where you cross over to the other side 'cause you don't see any other way out 'cause you see stuff in too much of a black and white way because you're a radical fundamentalist. I try to encourage people to get away from that. I mean, there's a side of me that's a decadent rock-and-roller as hell, and some people don't like that, but that's me too."
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