Please stop trying to raise my awareness

I wish people would stop trying to raise my awareness. I can’t so much as surf the web or stroll a high street these days without being accosted by one of the aware, who is always hellbent on making me as aware as he is, usually about some disease or, if you’re really lucky, the rifeness of child abuse. The army of the aware are everywhere, covered from head to toe in awareness ribbons, their arms weighted down by awareness bracelets, their aware brains bulging with scary stats about Aids, rape, breast cancer or boozing that they are desperate to impart to us, the blissfully unaware. These awareness-raisers seem to be aware of everything except how annoying they are.

Raising awareness has become the aim of just about every political movement and charity of the 21st century. There was a time — seems like donkey’s years ago now — when socially minded folk were focused on changing the actual, physical, infrastructural world. Now they’re obsessed with re-arranging the brain furniture of those of us who don’t know how many men aged 18 to 35 die of testicular cancer every year or what sarcoidosis is. (Nope, I don’t know either — but April is Sarcoidosis Awareness Month, so we’ll no doubt find out.) Charities now raise awareness about poverty rather than trying to end it. Schools raise awareness about STDs. Government officials raise awareness about the dangers of binge-drinking, or what the rest of us call ‘having three pints’. And there’s no option to remain unaware. To say ‘I know quite enough about Aids, thanks very much’ or ‘I don’t want to know what getting drunk every Saturday night for the next 20 years will do to my liver’ is to mark oneself out as unfeeling, one of the ribbonless rabble who refuse to become aware.