Friday, December 3, 2010

What does awareness accomplish

The last while there has been a virtual avalanche of causes demanding attention. They all demand that we act in a certain way, do a specific thing, or wear something in order to increase awareness. But what does it really do? Is there some advantage to "raising" awareness? I get that we all want the cure to cancer found or child abuse or bullying to stop but do these campaigns actually accomplish these goals? I guess what I'm getting at is how does, growing a moustache/wearing red or purple/changing your facebook picture?, how does doing any of these things accomplish first, even the intended task of raising awareness or second, the actual goal of stopping/curing the different world problem? No really tell me cause I'd really like to know. Cause as far as I can tell this is the most ridiculous way to accomplish these goals. Not only that but to constantly post this crap on facebook statuses as though all your friends and family are total idiots that are completely unaware that there are things like child abuse/bullying/AIDS/cancer is not just lazy, it's insulting.

It's lazy because, as a very smart friend of mine said, "it is literally the least you can do", if you want to donate your time or money into finding real solutions to these issues then you have my full support in doing so. If you want to go out and help coucil the people dealing with these issues then you not only have my support I will drive you wherever you have to go to help out and while I'm there I might even lend a hand. But if you want me to wear red or change my facebook picture or grow a moustache (when I don't intend to) then you my friend are going to be disappointed.

It's insulting, because I know about these issues, I am a savvy person who pays attention to the world around him and I'm sure most of your friends and family are the same. We all live in the world and are aware of the problems in it. There is no one that is not touched by most if not all of these issues so the idea that we are unaware is quite insulting.

Lastly the things you want me to do have very little or nothing to do with the problem associated with it, oh I know all about assigning pink to breast cancer and blue to prosate cancer and whatever to whatever but what I'm saying is that these colors were arbitrarily picked and have nothing to do with finding a cure for cancer. And as for growing a moustache this too has nothing to do with prostate cancer, if you want to grow something that has relevance to the issue grow your hair long and donate it for wigs for cancer patients, that is at least doing something. Then of course there is this new one, change your profile pic to a cartoon from your childhood to raise awareness of child abuse. I really don't think this is right on any level, can you honestly say that this makes sense, if anything I think it makes light of child abuse and completely misses the boat on "awareness raising".

2 comments:

  1. For the record, I changed my profile pic to a character from my youth, not to raise awareness, but because I thought it was an awesome change of pace. Does that make me a bad guy?

    ReplyDelete
  2. No I suppose not, but I do think a lot of people are motivated to change their pic because of that silly campaign going around facebook and I think that makes most of them fools not necessarily bad people.

    ReplyDelete