i think we as modern humans have a tendency to forget that historical people were also humans who had thoughts and feelings and dreams just like we do
bear in mind that i’m mostly interested in medieval english history, but… do you really think that all women suffered miserable, joyless lives? that no man ever loved his wife? that no gay person ever lived in peace? that no child ever grew up to live a life they loved? that no parent ever saw their disabled child and cared for them anyway? that nobody ever had sex, and enjoyed it? that no priest was ever truly virtous, that nunneries were always places where women were sent away to be locked up? do you really think that it was just suffering day in, day out, unless you were the richest of the rich? do you really think that simply living in a different time made people stupid, senseless, violent? do you really think that people living in the past were so different from us, that they never had thoughts and feelings and dreams to rival our own?
do you really think that people in the past were not people?
I don’t engage with post that wear me out so I’m making my own post to say that if you’re middle class and you go to a thrift store to get clothes to cut up for your crafts and sewing or support your purse collecting habit that’s fine. You’re not a gentrifier. You’re not taking resources away from less fortunate people who need them more because thrift stores are businesses, not services, so the more you patronize them the more they expand. I used to work at a thrift store and my boss told me we threw away about half of our donations from the street because they were too damaged or dirty and we threw away another half of the merchandise on the floor that didn’t sell. And that before the Marie Kondo trend. So yeah those sheets would look better on somebody’s bed than as a tablecloth you made but they look better as your craft project than getting thrown away. You don’t know. And you’re paying the store to stay open and put another set of sheets out tomorrow. So feel free to shop at thrift stores especially if you also donate to them.
I also used to work at a thrift store and we had so few customers that it had trouble going around and we threw away so many clothes because they didn’t sell that we were allowed to take them home for free.
Please. Please buy random thrifted clothes for your sewing projects, the resources are completely wasted if no one buys them and we got so so much.
I think the problem here is that Tunglr dot hell likes to take a fairly reasonable idea and run with it to the point of unreasonability
a fairly reasonable idea: it’s hard to find nice plus-sized clothes, especially if you’re poor; think before you take something nice and plus-sized and cut it down, because someone else might need it
a less reasonable idea: you should NEVER buy plus-sized clothes from the thrift store because poor people might need them, and buying ANYTHING nice from the thrift store is sketchy
a completely unreasonable idea: middle class people shouldn’t EVER shop at thrift stores and even poor people are on thin ice because someone else might need it more
