Volume 6, Number 14  Friday, April 22, 2005

Tie A Yellow Ribbon

I wasn’t surprised to hear earlier this week that Lance Armstrong is retiring after this summer’s Tour de France.  After all, he’s got a wristband empire to oversee.

Now, I’m not suggesting that when Lance, through his Lance Armstrong Foundation, teamed up with Nike to produce the LiveStrong wristbands, that he was planning to take over the world.  In fact, as best I can tell, the project had rather modest ambitions -- sell five million wristbands to raise $5 million to benefit Lance Armstrong Foundation programs that help kids with cancer.

At a buck a piece, the wristbands would be a great way for anybody to contribute to a great cause, and visibly show their support for cancer survivors and people fighting cancer.

But really, having been a horse in Nike’s stable for several years, Lance should’ve known better -- Nike doesn’t do anything unless it fits into their plan for world domination.

And thus, what began as a few million yellow silicone-rubber wristbands on a few million wrists has exploded into a full-blown wristband mania.  Go ahead, just try interacting with humans today, and see if you can go more than two hours without seeing a rubber wristband.  Not in America you won’t.  Not in 2005.

Because from Lance’s yellow wristbands have sprung an entire rainbow of wristbands, some for lofty causes, others not.

If you want to support Darfur, your “Save Darfur” wristband is green; if you want to remember Pat Tillman, your “Never Forget #40” wristband is red, and if you want to raise awareness about Autism, your wristband is blue -- but you’ve got options.  You can go with the blue “Think Autism.  Think Cure.” wristband, the blue “Embrace - Engage - Enable - Expand - Express” wristband, or the blue Autism Puzzle Pattern wristband.

About.com’s got an entire page filled with links to different wristbands for different causes.  And anymore, if you don’t have a wristband people can buy, how can you possibly have a legitimate cause?

Not that you need a cause to have a wristband, of course -- in their new catalog, Major League Baseball is selling team wristbands.  Actually, I suppose your team can be considered a cause -- especially if your team is the Cubs.  (Sorry, Cubs fans, but now that the Red Sox have finally won their World Series, you’re the best punch line left.  I suggest you get used to it -- or win something.)

And if you don’t have a cause so much as a mantra -- Hope, Courage, Love, Strength, Corn Flakes -- there’s still a wristband for you, and plenty of websites, like Life Bracelets or Crafts ‘N’ Scraps, willing to sell you one.

This assumes, of course, that you haven’t been to a cash register lately.  It seems like every time I go to pay for something, there’s a basket of bowl of wristbands there for the buying.

In fact, these things are so pervasive that I’ve acquired three of them in the last few weeks without even buying one -- a white “Save America’s Wetland” bracelet from the Campaign to Save Coastal Louisiana, a blue “Don’t Bet On It” wristband from the NCAA, and a teal “Live Generously” wristband from the Jewish Federation of St. Louis.

Above all else, this wristband proliferation proves yet again that there has never so good an idea that millions of people wouldn’t copy it shamelessly.  I suppose we should just be thankful that Lance didn’t get an idea for LiveStrong legwarmers.

But in our goofiness to jump on the wristbandwagon, we’re willfully ignoring the serious issues these wristbands raise.

First off, while these wristbands do a wonderful job of raising awareness -- at least of wristbands -- I wonder how well they work for raising money.  At a buck or two a pop, and with hundreds of them out there competing for people’s attention, are they really raising that much money?  Do people buy their one-dollar wristband and think they’ve done something special for the cause?  Is this going to dry up the more-meaningful $25, $50 or $100 donations?

And from a practical perspective, what’s the life span of these things?  Back when people wore ribbons for causes, you could count on that ribbon to fall off or fall apart in a few days.  But silicone rubber is damn near indestructible -- you could wear these things forever.  What I’m getting at is, if I support America’s Wetlands by wearing a wristband, just how long do I have to do it?  What’s a reasonable wristband expectation? 

The LiveStrong website informs me that the wristbands are not edible (thank God -- I was worried), but are they biodegradable?  In a few years, when this fad has passed, are we going to need special wristband landfills -- or incineration facilities?

Look, all I’m saying is, I think we need to have a national dialogue on the topic.

And maybe then we can figure out how Nike’s going to use everybody else’s wristbands to take over the world.