I Want To Raise Awareness About Not Raising Awareness Anymore
There’s a lot said nowadays about “awareness” and “raising awareness” as if this is the best way to solve the world’s problems.
The background on the awareness movement stems from the fact that at some point protesty, do-gooder type folks started to feel a little ineffective wearing their “End World Hunger!” or “Fight Racism!” slogan shirts when after many years of demanding that hunger be ended and performing a vast gang initiation style beating on Racism, both things still existed.
So they went back to the drawing board and asked the question:
What is something that we can do that has no quantifiable way of being measured yet still makes us look like noble social warriors?
The answer was awareness.
It started with the yellow bracelets. Then the ribbons. Then the bumper stickers.
This bumper sticker is a personal favorite of mine, and in the town I live in (Santa Monica, California) they practically give it to you with your welcome to the neighborhood package along with generous coupons to local retailers and a free sample of dish soap:
I suppose in this day and age with the problems between certain religions this is a nice sentiment. However, the funny thing about this bumper sticker is I think what they’re really trying to say is this:
I argue that awareness is a bad thing and I have some psychological theory on my side.
There was a incident in New York City several years ago where a woman was being raped in broad daylight in front of a crowd of several people.
Nobody did anything, thinking that somebody else would or should do something.
Psychologists argue that if only one or two people saw this crime they probably would have intervened but because there were several people their responsibility to help the victim was dispersed among them and they had less responsibility to help.
They call this dispersion of responsibility.
Similarly traumatic for me in my life is when my friends and I are planning a barbecue and nobody wants to bring the expensive items such as beer or liquor assuming that someone else will. What ends up happening is we all converge and then we’re like:
Wait, none of you assholes brought any beer? And who brought all these 89 cent hot dog buns?
With that in mind, if you guys know of some bad shit going on somewhere, don’t tell me about it, just sort it out!
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Tagged with awareness, bracelets, bumper stickers, coexist, darfur, dispersion of responsibility, ribbons
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I prefer this version of the “Free Tibet” t-shirt:
http://www.zazzle.com/free_tibet_tshirt-235739933027564684
Note the fine print.
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ha ha.. excellent
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Are you familiar with the work of Jim Goad? Check him out at http://www.jimgoad.net.
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thanks pete, great site..
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Haha, nice. Love your sense of humor. Your example, while good, isn’t necessarily an example of awareness. <— J/k ^_-"
Nice post.
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The “especially you assholes” comment was interesting. I read this at America’s Watchtower: “So, are these people talking to the radical Muslims? For it is them that truly needs to learn coexist with us. It is they that need to learn to accept us. We have spent far too many years trying to coexist with terrorists and it led to September 11th.”
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Are you forgetting something, we are human, we don’t co-exist we exploit and destroy. Acceptance usually comes in the form of a cruise missle or a roadside bomb or even a 7.62mm round.
We should accept and co-exist but it won’t happen. The most acceptance that has occurred here is when a suicide bomber dons his vest and accepts he will die.
The worst kind of humans. Humanity and our species sicken me.
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You should see the hipster doofuses froth at the mouth at my “Support the brutal Chinese occupation and suppression of Tibet” shirt.
San Francisco is full of fags, and not the good homosexual kind, but the weak lame politically correct kind.
There are worse places that San Francisco, but no worse people.
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I agree with you entirely about dispersion of responsibility. That seems to be pervasive at both local and national levels. And while you’d probably type me as one of those do-gooder protestor people, I will say that raising awareness is only minimally successful. Most people have no desire whatsoever to have their consciousness, or conscience, or intelligence raised one iota. They are blissful in their ignorance.
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With the statement and example you’re giving regarding Dispersion of Responsibility or, the Bystander Effect, I think you’re probably referring to the murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City. She was raped repeatedly and murdered, while there were several eyewitnesses in the early morning. It’s a textbook example used in my introductory psychology class and it does show how we all are inclined to shovel the responsibility to another person, or assume someone else will pick up the load. Quite depressing.
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I always considered “raising awareness” to be nothing more than moral entertainment, where people justify doing nothing by telling other people to do it. The only awareness raising I did was wear pink armbands or tape when I played football in highschool to raise money for cancer research, when people asked me if I was doing it for breast cancer I said “not breast cancer, ALL cancer”, the pink was just to grab attention. Even then though, I recognized that all I was doing was playing football. Nothing more.
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I always considered “raising awareness” to be nothing more than moral entertainment, where people justify doing nothing by telling other people to do it. The only awareness raising I did was wear pink armbands or tape when I played football in highschool to raise money for cancer research, when people asked me if I was doing it for breast cancer I said “not breast cancer, ALL cancer”, the pink was just to grab attention. Even then though, I recognized that all I was doing was playing football. Nothing more.
That being said, this out lines my thoughts perfectly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yIlX5ZKHRU
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I once saw a bumper sticker that read “families are forever.” It depicted a happy group of stick figures, holding hands, some taller than others, others with longer hair (and there might have been a stick dog in there as well).
Anyway, I thought to myself: “Now, Relayer, what do you think that person is trying to accomplish with that sticker? If families really were ‘forever’, then there would be no broken families, no problem. But then if that were the case, then this person wouldn’t need to display the bumper sticker in the first place. Who else does it address but the dysfunctional, broken up families? But if families do break up, then they are not forever. Shit. I had better get two six packs today.”
To sum up: The very use of the ‘families are forever’ bumper sticker invalidates its own message. So what’s the point, if not a clear and coherent message?
I, too, have not been able to fail to notice the ‘coexist’ sticker–one of my favorites (even though the Star of David is a far cry from an ‘x’). Nothing like the bumper of some stranger’s automobile to advise me on how to act and think. Kind of like the human form of dog butt-sniffing, it seems.
Anyway, I wonder, if those who refuse to coexist–whatever that means–had a symbol, would the hippies who created the sticker have found a place for it in their happy little alphabet, just like they did for the peace sign? Of course not, but they should, which brings us back to incoherence, the question ‘WHY?’, and the ultimate answer: butt-sniffing.
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