where is it all going?

    Your shopping choices may seem like small potatoes when you look at the big picture.  Ice caps melting.  Species threatened.  Dictators and terrorists killing hundreds of thousand of innocent people.  Civilians, not soldiers, bearing the bloody brunt of war.  Children making your clothing, your children’s toys, your car parts.  Picking your fruit.

    That big picture is shaped by millions of people facing the same choices you face.  If many of us make those choices conscientiously, big changes happen.  Look at what happened when people turned against smoking, or championed recycling or physical fitness or healthy cooking or low-emission gasoline.  These changes were powered by consumers and activists who changed our public and personal priorities.  Not by — indeed, in spite of — advertising campaigns, mass-marketing, and product placement in movies and TV shows.  Nor by corporate lobbying paid for in pre-tax dollars.  

    Ordinary citizens changed things.  Not so long ago, you ran to find an ash tray when a guest lit up a cigarette in your home.  One of the folks sitting near you at work probably smoked on the job.  Not so long ago, a rare few of us hauled our bottles and newspapers to recycling stations.  The big picture was still 99.9% of waste headed for the landfill — but it made us feel good.  Look at it now!  It’s far from perfect, but it’s getting somewhere.

    In Toronto back in the '70s, activists sprayed “Boycott South Africa” on Paarl Wine ads on the sides of buses in the dead of night, to protest apartheid.  In a few years, pressure grew so much that the Ontario liquor board — the largest buyer of alcohol in the world (true fact!) — stopped buying all South African goods.  

    In the '80s there was a ripple of movement among academic organizations not to hold annual conventions in states with sodomy laws.  And in some cases the advocates eventually succeeded.  Today... well, the National Basketball Association pulled its 2017 All-Star Game out of North Carolina because the state passed an anti-transgender bathroom law.  Some protests do become mainstream.  

        Most major retailers now offer environmentally friendly products, priced competitively (although hardly ever on sale) alongside their environmentally unfriendly counterparts.  You don’t have to bring your own container to get eco-friendly laundry soap out of a barrel at an alternative depot anymore.  And vegetarians don’t have to be stuck with greasy fries and limp salad when they eat out.

    People who are still working today remember when LGTB people had to keep it dead secret or lose their jobs.  Pregnant women were fired when they "started to show."  Now we have paid maternity leave, and governments are apologizing and compensating LGBT people whose careers were destroyed.

    Dudley Does Right holds the firm belief that sweatshops, animal cruelty, environmental degradation and a lot more will be stopped.  It will take hard work by activists, and the consumers who support their causes.  But we only have to look back at how far we’ve come, to get an idea how far we'll be going.