Slacktivism and You

If you’re on Facebook, and you are, chances are you are a Slacktivist.  You may be one to a greater or lesser degree but few thing in the world have such an air of “I almost care” to them as Facebook and its assorted groups that purport to be for or against whatever cause is currently trendy.  Slacktivism is the lazy man’s way to pretend to care in a way that actually helps no one at all.  Yay!

Current slacktivist flavor of the month is bra colors.  Have you posted the color of your bra on Facebook and/or seen a friend who posted the mysterious “white” or “chartreuse” to their status without an explanation?  For those who don’t understand (men, as men were specifically left out of this little cause du jour), the idea was to list the color of the bra you were wearing that day which, somehow, supports breast cancer and is so much fun! Tee hee!

Now, arguably, you could say that excluding men and making it a childish game horribly trivializes what is a serious disease that kills many people, including men.  You could argue that listing the color of your bra is an insult to women who have had to endure breast cancer, you know, the women who have had mastectomies and no longer wear bras.  You could even argue that by keeping it a secret little downlow code between ladies makes it a silly, childish game like when you used to make up languages to talk to each other on the schoolyard, something so horribly out of place in relation to a disease that has killed millions it almost boggles the mind.  But above all else, you need to recognize that there is no conceivable way this supports or brings awareness to the issue of breast cancer.  How could it?  You don’t do anything.

Still, the fun of slacktivism is that it makes you feel good and you don’t need to put effort into feeling good.  And at FunnyCrave we support feeling good.  We don’t do anything that involves getting out of our chairs to support it, but we support it all the same.  And in light of that, here are some other slactivist ideas you can enjoy when you’re feeling socially conscious but don’t want to put pants on;

• Wear a rubber bracelet that supports not murdering people.  Not Murder is a great cause.
• Sign an internet petition to ban nuclear weapons.  Once North Korea sees that the internet is against them, they’ll fold like a house of cards.  Once that’s done, we can work on getting Firefly back on the air.
• Put a ribbon on your car that signifies your distaste for the Dirty Sanchez.  It won’t stop unless we make it stop, people.
• Yell out the window at some kid to get off your lawn.  It supports the elderly.
• Too cold to go protest down at the clinic?  Masturbate! It’s your own personal statement against unplanned pregnancy.
• Has your local government decided to start killing minorities?  Better email your friends telling them that it’s a bad idea.  Also, let them know that if they don’t forward it to 10 people in the next hour, they’re going to get gangrene of the ass.
• Sign an email petition.  Because those aren’t retarded.
• Teach those oil companies a lesson by not buying gas today.  Buy it tomorrow instead.  Oh man, those suckers are going to be living in dumpsters in no time!  Ha ha!

In a nutshell, if you haven’t raised money for research, if you haven’t educated others in a real, tangible way, if you haven’t gone to your local representatives with a well thought out argument and a plan, if you haven’t contributed your time and effort to accomplishing a goal that actually was finished and helped better someone’s life, you have not done anything for your supposed cause.  Saying you support something is about as meaningful as saying you want tacos.  That’s awesome for you, you should do something about it though.

Incidentally, everyone at FunnyCrave is wearing a cupless bra today.  And they’re red as the devil’s ass.