Opinionated Shoes

 Opinionated Shoes

I was browsing the internet for after-Christmas sales and I was surprised to find a pair of shoes that I like turned into merchandise for a politician I am not fond of. That’s right, I found a pair of Converse that were cherry red like the ones I have loved and scribbled on, only, in place of cheesy song lyrics, they read “TRUMP: Make America Great Again”. This made me question my choice to wear these shoes. I’m not super into boycotts, I mean I still shopped at Nordstrom’s (Rack) when they sold the Ivanka shoes, but I don’t shop at Brandy Melville or Urban Outfitters because I don’t like what they sell enough to compromise my beliefs against it, specifically in regard to Brandy’s “One size fits all” and Urban’s “Kent State” sweatshirt stained red and “Eat Less” t-shirt.

The Converse, bring me to a point of reassessment because obviously I’m not going to waste a perfectly good pair of shoes but I can still wonder if I would have bought them had I known of these shoes earlier. I think, that the first step is to see if Nike, Converse’ parent company is a corporate sponsor of the Trump campaign so that I can know where my money is going (I mean with my shoes it’s a little different because I thrifted them so like 15 dollars are going to Goodwill rather than 70 to Nike). A quick search of the internet shows, “the Center for Responsive Politics reports. Nike employees and the company's political action committee have given GOP candidates $424,000 in the 2018 election cycle, and only $122,000 to Democrats,” and according to Business Insider, it has financially supported Trump’s campaign. Ok, I am very anti superpacs and corporate sponsorship for ANY party so if I were buying them now, I would probably try and look to other brands that don’t preach how progressive they are but act the exact opposite.

            For me, knowing this, I am going to keep wearing my shoes, but try and thrift any other shoes that I buy because I like knowing that I can sustain local programs with my money, even though I know it is probably going somewhere I don't want it to anyway. In reality, we are almost always funding something that we disagree with, so at this point, the best that we can do is remain informed and decide for ourselves what compromises we are willing to make and what we truly find unjust.