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Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Current mood: annoyed

When I was in high school, a number of kids had MIA bracelets. Those wearing them told me that the idea was they would wear the bracelet until the soldier named on the bracelet was located.

I thought this was pretty impressive that these teenagers were committing to possibly wearing the bracelet their whole lives if this MIA soldier never turned up. Later I wasn’t so impressed as one by one these kids stopped wearing their bracelets… even though the MIA hadn’t been located.

Around 1990, the Rocky Horror cast I was in, went to a Rocky Horror convention. At one point we were in a large meeting room with many other casts, for the purpose of organizing the casts before the convention show. Sal Piro, a gay guy who’s likely the highest-profile RHPS fan of all time, was running the meeting. He stood up and told us that he was wearing a red ribbon for AIDs, and he was going to wear this ribbon every day until a cure for AIDs was found, and he wanted all of us to pledge to wear a ribbon too. The room was mostly full of impressionable teenagers and young adults, and they all filed up there and very seriously took a ribbon from Sal and pinned it onto their clothes.

My cast sat there and refused to go up and get ribbons. We stated that we didn’t believe that everyone in the room was making a serious pledge. We didn’t believe everyone was going to honor their vow to wear the ribbon until a cure for AIDs was found. We felt these were mock vows, that the flippancy of this behavior was disrespectful to the seriousness of AIDs and the plight of AIDs victims.

Of course everybody in the room got really, really mad at us.

I’m certain none of you are surprised to hear that soon after that, I saw new photos of Sal Piro and — ta da — no AIDs ribbon on his shirt any more. What an ass. And if you look at recent pictures of him, no AIDs ribbon either.

And I’ll bet all his little followers there stopped wearing their ribbon soon after they left that convention.

So… looking back on these two memories….

I don’t know how people can step up and do something symbolic and say “This act symbolizes how serious this issue is, and symbolizes how deeply I care” — and then throw that symbol in the garbage. Don’t they understand that they’re being dickwads — that their behavior disses these causes, instead of honoring them?