Clothing giant Gap has pulled a controversial T-shirt off its warehouse shelves after outraged consumers lashed out via social media. The simple, dark-blue T-shirt with “MANIFEST DESTINY” printed on it in stark white letters was part of the “Gap x GQ” collection, a joint effort between Gap and GQ Magazine to showcase America’s best new designers. [1]

The term which caused the clothes firm so much trouble was coined in 1845 by John O’Sullivan, a newspaper editor at the Democratic Review, who wrote that the United states should annex Texas and claim the Oregon Country because “that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us”. The whole idea was used as a justification for many people with darker skin…

Yes, for a long time people believed that they are the masters of the cosmos…

Now people know that they should be in harmony with their environment.

But could that be sheer hypocrisy?

Let’s look who is complaining about such a motto “wrongly” used on a shirt…

Is it you, you pathetic consuming beast. You who constantly eats, drinks and wears clothes created by people working under slavery conditions. You who believe that taking 5 minute Yoga lessons while having 3 cars and 5 TV sets will help you reach “harmony”. You who gets a new cell phone every year (for which Africa is ravaged by civil wars due to the resources taken from there to create those fancy cell phones). Well, people like you do not have the right to be so “sensitive”…

And yes, people should try to make something to control their destiny (as much as they can anyway). Because if they don’t, they become the same as stones and dirt.

And NO. We should not stop quotting something which could be good because some other idiots used it once upon a time to justify crimes.

But that’s what happens when a society thinks that buying clothes is all you can do.

Try buying a book sometimes…