I Am Raising Awareness On Raising Awareness

I am sure everyone who reads this has seen something about raising awareness in the past. Be it a hashtag or a breast cancer awareness pink ribbon, they are everywhere. This is good right? I mean the first step to making a situation better is by knowing that the situation exists in the first place! While that last statement is correct there is a major misconception about what exactly raising awareness does.

I love that people want to help people who are worse off than them. This is a good mind set to be in. But raising awareness is only the first step, and it is a shame that for 90% of the public that raise awareness only do that and nothing else. After a while raising awareness only costs money. Before people know about a problem raising awareness will do two things in theory. 1: spread word about a problem. And 2: get the attention of people with money who might want to donate to help the cause/pay less on taxes. This is a good start sure, but after everyone knows about an issue all the advertising costs start to drain money away from other aspects of the cause.

That link also points out a study that shows people who just raise awareness assume that what they have done fills some kind of "goodness quotient" and use it as an excuse to behave poorly in other areas of life. Its this kind of shit that's the reason we can't have nice things. But if you want to actually help, there is plenty that you can do. After awareness is spread stop spreading it, and funnel the marketing costs into solutions to the problem. Everyone knows cigarettes are bad for you, that's why there is warning labels on the packages. All raising awareness about lung cancer does now is make shitty marketing execs richer.

Maybe create a scholarship for people who want to become doctors who try to cure cancer instead of making "awareness raising" breast cancer vodka. Adding #awareness or whatever to your tweets does almost nothing (if not absolutely nothing) to help the core of whatever problem you are trying to help. Maybe instead volunteer at/donate money to an inner city charity. Do something other than just talk about a problem.

I feel like I need to be clear about this. I am not trying to say that all awareness raising is useless, just the bulk of it for campaigns that are older than a couple of years. Just talking about the problem doesn't solve it. Action needs to be taken for something to happen. I will leave the last word to Doug Stanhope.