Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Cancer Bracelets or Horribly Innapropriate Hypocrite Sticks? I Decide.

reiii · 04-19-2005, 01:55 PM

Grabbed this off of TF, food for thought. Still not sure how I feel about it

Quote:

Tuesday April 12th, 2005
By joe

Slap bracelets. Ugg boots. Mossimo shirts. Cancer research? If it was a year ago, or if you had good taste, and I asked you which trend does not belong, the choice seems clear. In an unprecedented invasion of stupidity, however, cancer, the family of diseases that brings pain and grief to the lives of millions of people every year, has been branded, along with those delightful relics of the 1990s and those furry miracle boots, with the insidious hot poker of the hip. I write, of course, of the Live Strong bracelets. Oh fickle fashion, how your idiot pendulum swings from the depths of ostentation to the bottomless abyss of misguided good intention! These yellow plastic bracelets, nearly ubiquitous around campus, might possibly be mistaken as (it pains me to write this word in this column) noble. Indeed, the Nike website at which these one dollar accessories are sold exhorts us to “Buy this…and contribute to the effort to help people around the world who are living with cancer.” What an ingenious idea: a charity that gives you something to wear so everyone that sees you knows you donated money to charity! It won’t be long before we see United Way mood rings and Habitat for Humanity chokers; why not advertise our favorite charity like we advertise our favorite brand? Move over Paper Denim, here comes the Boy’s and Girl’s Clubs of America!

Well, as fucking horrible as this sounds in theory, it’s—and I write this without hyperbole—a million times worse in practice. A casual oral survey of people wearing the Live Strong bracelets (among them friends of mine and morons alike), elicited such enlightened responses to the question of “why wear them?” as “cancer is bad”, “I don’t know, my friend gave me one”, and my favorite, “they look cool”. In case you don’t understand how I feel, I’ll tell you: by making cancer research into a trend and lumping it in with a million forgettable and stupid fads, you trivialize it and everything that goes along with it, namely cancer, the real disease that you cannot take on and off like a shitty piece of plastic. If you want to wear something and belong to a group, how about you choose something that does not purport to represent the struggle with cancer—you probably don’t know what that means and even if you do, you should know better. Because what happens when, next season, Jennifer Aniston and Sheryl Crow decide to wear torn leather jackets to some awards show and leave their little yellow bracelets at the bottom of the drawer or in the trash can? People with cancer will still have cancer, and this too idiotic to be pretentious trend won’t have helped at all.

Original article:

http://www.colombiannecktie.com/index.php?id=11