laratheescapeartist

I like to think of myself as a good person. But just because I don’t go around smacking people seems to be a fairly low bar to set as the definition of being ‘good’. I share nothing except photos on facebook , and unless you are in them, who wants to see those?  I still buy cheap clothes I don’t really need  even though I know the people making them work in terrible conditions, I buy meat and dairy products of dubious origins that is probably pumped up on antibiotics even though one of my biggest fears is antibiotic resistance, I buy fruit and veg from the supermarket that are covered in pesticides and packaging, I have cleaning products and hair and beauty products all filled with chemicals galore in the house that I know are harming me and the environment, I take the car on journeys I could make just as easily by public transport, all the while complaining about the air quality in the centre of town, and I’ve flown so many times that now living under a flight path and dealing with all the noise and disturbance the aeroplanes cause seems like karmic payback.   Despite the fact that I recycle and give token amounts of money to charity, I’m probably not a very good person.

And whilst it is tempting to just go with the flow and encourage my daughter to behave more like this:

to be able to ‘succeed’ in life in our current neoliberalist, competition is everything society, I’ve decided to try and heed my own advice to my daughter and start sharing.*

So what can I share? For a start I can share my cartoons and paintings. Yes, they’ve always been free to view on this blog, but I’ll no longer try to sell them through the blog or any other means (not that I was doing that particularly successfully beforehand, but it’s more the principle of the thing). If you would like to use any of the images on this blog, please write to me to request my permission and if I grant it, all I ask is that you credit me as the artist.

More on what else I can share to come…

*Yes, I could try to make more responsible consumer choices. But when product advertisements are designed to manipulate and have no basis in facts, and the entirety of our economic system (and therefore the vast majority of all business) is profit driven based on the idea of the ‘self-interested’ man I think the term responsible consumer is an oxymoron. Far better to minimise my consumption as much as possible by avoiding advertisements and sharing what I have.