I was just about to pen an amusing piece about how the whole world (well Western world anyway) has gone plastic/rubber bracelet mad. I was going to point out that since Lance Armstrong launched the Livestrong bracelet last year, we’ve seen a massive explosion in bracelets including a blue bullying one, a white Make Poverty History one, and most recently a pair of intertwined black and white anti-racism in football ones.
But a bit of a Google search later reveals that a journo at BBC online has just beaten me to it. Bastards. And they’ve managed to list far more bracelets than I was aware of. I would however add that as far as I can see, the least deserving cause I’ve come across with bracelets available is the NBC daytime soap loyalty bracelets. If you’re a big fan od Days of Our Lives or Passions, you can (or rather could – since I think the promotion’s finished) get a bracelet for your show, and then maybe see your name listed in the credits of the show during sweeps month. (Sweep month, incidentally, is the strangely archaic way of getting ratings for the vast swathes of smaller TV stations in the US. Because there are too many to do regular ratings, they do a fuller survey at two points in the year. And since everyone knows the dates that this’ll happen, all the networks go hell for leather putting out strong programming through this period to gather as many viewers as possible. Advertiser rates are then set based on this short period, irrespective of the fact that everyone’s pulled enormous stunts to get viewers watching. Radio in the UK was once the same with the biggest survey happening during the second quarter of the year. So it was in this period that every station spent the bulk of its marketing budget and put on its biggest promotions. Remember “31 Days In May” on Radio 1?).
Returning to my original theme, it’s worth noting that I own no bracelets for three reasons:
1) They’re really jewelry and I don’t like wearing any jewelry aside from a wristwatch. I’d find a bracelet severly irritating.
2) They’re too much of a fashion accessory. Do charities that had previously adopted ribbons now feel as though they have to move on to bracelets? Do something original and stick to it, like Comic Relief’s red nose, and the Royal British Legion’s poppy.
3) There’s no “end date” on these campaigns. I prefer acknowledging charities at certain times of the year. Both Comic Relief and the British Legion fulfill this by having days associated with them. A couple of weeks beforehand is enough. It’s not as though any of us are continuing to give to the charity beyond the date we bought the badging device. So permamently wearing your Aids ribbon or whatever, almost says that you’re “milking” that initial donation for months afterwards. And if you do give a Direct Debit, then excellent, but do you really need to keep broadcasting the fact that you give “to chariddee mate, but I don’t like to talk about?” Remember those cars that used to keep their Comic Relief noses on for a full year or so beyond the end of Comic Relief day? Didn’t you want to go around and cut them off? Of course charities need your money all year round, but if they all went for permament fixtures on our bodies and clothes then I’d have no space left. With several bracelets, red noses, stickers, pins, poppies and ribbons. I’d certainly be colourful. We end up getting back to deciding which is the more important charity. Is it Tsunami survivors, people who sacrifice themselves to keep our country free, those who’re working on cures for some of the world’s worst diseases and viruses, or the thousands who die daily due to hunger and suffering brought on by their country’s debts and civil wars? I’m not ranking them in order.
There I go again, ranting on about charities which seems incredibly, well, uncharitable of me. But at least I didn’t get started on those street hucksters who techniques I simply can’t abide to get you to sign up (particularly as many of the people doing the “huckstering” are not the volunteers you see in stations and on high streets with their collecting tins, but paid professionals who get to keep up to the first nine months worth of contributions from your Direct Debits before the charity starts to benefit. Much better that you sign up direct with the charity yourself). I seem to have the sort of face that makes them bound into view when I walk by. And they never even seem to learn that the day before, a completely different charity was working the exact same place in the street, which, if it happens to be on your lunchtime sandwich run, leads to more “no thank yous” than is healthy for anyone.