Because my family is interested in football, I found myself watching it this past Sunday. I’m not particularly interested in the sport over all, but I’ll watch it on occasion. This Sunday, I saw a lot of players wearing pink in some form or another and when I asked about it, I was told it was for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
My first thought was that it was stupid for football players to participate in this campaign. A more manly cancer should’ve been picked, like prostate or testicular cancer. These bright pink pieces of clothing looked really fruity. Then again, I’ve never considered many football players to be real men, especially the current ones.
Why on Earth do we have all these awareness campaigns in the first place. Most of these diseases or genetic defects that are part of this are stuff we all know about. When I was in the fifth grade, my class was forced to watch a video on AIDS where it was stated explicitly that you could only get AIDS from sexual contact or blood transfusions from an infected person. They had a neat cartoon dog, similar to McGruff the Crime Dog, telling us about it. When I was in Health class in High School, I was taught how to check for testicular cancer and, if needed, breast cancer.
It got worse in college. At Virginia Tech, every week was one long awareness campaign about something or another. They always seemed to be related to some Left-Wing Progressive type of cause. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender folks had a whole week to tell us all about themselves. There was an AIDS week, although I don’t think anyone on campus had AIDS, but it was a very large campus. Heck, the bulk of my freshman orientation was nothing but a really unfunny version of that film PCU, except nobody just accepted each other for who they are in the end.
The college life is all about dividing people up into groups and conquering each one. Only Christians, especially white Christians though I spent much of my college years with Asian Christians, are singled out as inherently evil.
Oh, and don’t get me started about the feminists marching past my window at 11:00 PM at night shouting, “Yes means yes and no means no.” OK, I won’t touch in any way sexually you ugly hags. Let me sleep, I’ve got to go to class tomorrow morning.
Now that I’m out of college, I still see various campaigns, mostly in the form of magnetic ribbons on cars. But now I see a bunch of big, beefy professional athletes wearing pink. I think some feminist group was snickering while watching this at the grand joke they’ve played on the NFL.
Look, I have no real problem with fighting diseases or promoting openness for various behaviors that weren’t considered acceptable a few decades before. It’s the constant bombardment of these campaigns that irritates the heck out of me. To top that off, these campaigns have become nothing more than a weird form of victim worship where the victim of cancer is elevated to god-like status. It’s a shameful display of ego.
I’m probably just coming off as a giant dick here, but I am just sick and tired of these awareness campaigns. I’m aware now, OK? You mission is accomplished and I think you can go back to actually solving the problem rather than whining about it.