MANIC STREET PREACHER ON OXFORD STREET

When myself and my friend Zahra had finished shopping on Oxford Street yesterday, we were met with a man and his megaphone at the station. He was ’dissecting’ what a ‘brainwashed’ person had bought in a shop and how it was probably made by a ’Chinese slave child’ that got paid peanuts and he informed us that we’re all mentally ill for buying these things.




Well. As much as I commend his point itself - that £40 for a top is over-priced and that exploitation of children is bad thing - his method of arguing was so antagonistic that nobody was going to listen to him. Yes it is wrong that children have to work in horrendous conditions just to feed their family but the fact is that without a job, those children would starve because they have no source of income. Their parents can’t provide for them and their days would be spent contracting diseases in squalid streets. This isn’t the fault of an innocent shopper on the high street, it’s the government of whichever country: from Pakistan to China, that needs to take accountability for this and make a change. By insulting strangers through a megaphone and implying people should make their own clothes, this man is solving nothing. If anything, he’s encouraging an apathetic disposition by pointing the blame at whoever is listening outside the station. Also, myself and Zahra couldn’t help but wonder where he bought his jeans from? We’re sure he didn’t make them himself and that flaws his argument already.

One point I did agree with was his assertion that the passer-by who ‘works’ in advertising isn’t actually ‘working’ and these children are. It may be a job but what most of us do isn’t actually ‘work’. Having said that, why should it be that everybody must spend their lives working? If you think about it, it’s quite sadistic to think that we have to spend 8 hours of the day putting ourselves through stress and misery just to ‘earn’ the right to relax afterwards. I wish the world was fair just as much as everybody else does but you‘ll have to excuse my realism for thinking that the likelihood of this happening to slim to none.