Usage As An Awareness Ribbon
Brown ribbons are worn on the lapel for anti-tobacco, colon cancer (Brown ribbon is the alternate color, Dark blue is the official ribbon color), and colorectal cancer awareness.
Brown ribbons have also been proposed by comedian George Carlin, meaning "Eat shit motherfucker", as a cynical response to the preponderance of other ribbons as symbols of political or social movements.
P.J. O'Rourke has indirectly suggested a brown ribbon campaign to fight diarrhea:
"Political means could be used to prevent almost all deaths from childhood diarrhea. Diarrhea is spread by contaminated water. Public sanitation is, like personal security, national defense, and rule of law, one of the few valid reasons for politics to exist. Lowly, semicomic diarrhea kills 2,866,000 people a year worldwide, 2,474,000 of them children under the age of five. This is ten times the number of people who die from AIDS. But no one is wearing a brown ribbon on his tuxedo lapel at the Academy Awards or marching up the Mall in Washington carrying a sign reading DIARRHEA -- IT CAN BE CONTAINED."
Read more about this topic: Brown Ribbon
Famous quotes containing the words usage, awareness and/or ribbon:
“Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates—but pages
Might be filled up, as vainly as before,
With the sad usage of all sorts of sages,
Who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore!
The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“I have taken the ribbon from around my neck and hidden it somewhere on my person. If you find it, you can have it. You are free to look for it any way you will, and I will think very little of you if you do not find it.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)