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:
“I am using it [the word ‘perceive’] here in such a way that to say of an object that it is perceived does not entail saying that it exists in any sense at all. And this is a perfectly correct and familiar usage of the word.”
—A.J. (Alfred Jules)
“The toddler’s wish to please ... is a powerful aid in helping the child to develop a social awareness and, eventually, a moral conscience. The child’s love for the parent is so strong that it causes him to change his behavior: to refrain from hitting and biting, to share toys with a peer, to become toilet trained. This wish for approval is the parent’s most reliable ally in the process of socializing the child.”
—Alicia F. Lieberman (20th century)
“I’ll tell you how the Sun rose—
A Ribbon at a time—”
—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)