My conscience, like my lapel, is clear...

I don't do ribbons. Don't get me wrong; I understand why people wear them, and I'm all for some of the wonderful causes the ribbons are used to represent, but I just don't wear them personally. I don't have a pink ribbon for breast cancer or a red ribbon for AIDS or a really limp little flesh-colored one for erectile dysfunction. It isn't that I couldn't have them if I wanted; my anti-ribbon position is an affirmative stance. I don't wear ribbons because I do not want to wear them.

Why? Because ribbons annoy the pants off me more surely than a phalanx of sweaty soccer moms swooning over Al Gore. ("You know... you really need to watch 'An Inconvenient truth!'" Um, the really inconvenient truth for me today is that you are currently breathing my air.) I abhor empty gestures, and for me, ribbons are the emptiest. (Heck, there isn't even a gesture. The thing just hangs there.)

I remember back during the first gulf war (you remember... the good one) when some students at NC State were staging a "die-in" on campus to protest the war. Literally pairs of kids took time out of their busy schedule of copying off of each other and begging for extensions on papers they didn't really intend to finish, late or otherwise, to lie on the ground and do nothing for an hour or two. I mean, first of all these were college students; lying around doing nothing is hard-wired into their collective consciousness. As gestures go, it certainly wasn't a huge undertaking to drag their lazy asses out of their bong-water stained beanbag chairs and plant them on the sun-warmed bricks of the brickyard for a couple of hours.

If your intention is to show people how strongly you feel about something, shouldn't you do something that takes a little effort? For example, if one guy walked up to one of the protesters and calmly said, "I disagree with you," but another guy ran over and began kicking the patchouli oil out of a couple of them, well... I'm going to be inclined to think that the second guy feels quite a bit more passionately about the issue than the first.

Even more importantly the gesture was empty; it was devoid of value, meaningless, and several other synonyms for "empty." Lying down for a couple of hours does nothing to change the situation about which these people claimed to be so worked up. If you really care about an issue, shouldn't you do something substantive? Maybe write letters to your congressman or your senator, or better yet, Oprah? But hey, they were just college kids, so I should probably cut them a little slack. I mean, how many of them would actually know how to write a letter, anyway.

But this ribbon thing... I see fully grown adults wearing these things, proudly. "Look at my ribbon! See how much I care about {insert cause here}? I care a lot, and you need only look at my ribbon for proof! By the way, I couldn't help noticing that you don't have a {insert color here} ribbon on your person, which shows how much better than you I am, you worthless {insert expletive here}." These people wear ribbons on their lapels, stick them to their bumpers and windshields... they'd probably get them tattooed on their asses if society allowed them to walk around without pants. (Though at least that would be a gesture.)

Years ago I attended an AIDS benefit. (You remember back when people used to care about AIDS, don't you?) The entire evening basically went like this. "Hi, I'm Blaine (or Hunter or Justin or Thad; you know the type...). It's so nice to have you here! Let me give you a ribbon."

"No thanks."

"Really?"

"Yes, really. I'm fine, thanks."

"But, um... everyone else has a ribbon."

"Yes. I can see that. They're lovely, but I'm deathly afraid of pins."

"Oh... well can I scotch-tape one on for you?"

And so on...

Seriously, I spent the entire night trying to avoid having to explain why I didn't want a friggin' ribbon. Here I was at an event that was raising money for a worthy cause. The very act of being there was not only a gesture, but one that resulted in money going to the cause in question, and despite this I was hounded by people who couldn't understand that I didn't need to make an empty gesture to show I cared. If my money or my presence there or my oath never to have unprotected sex with a man didn't prove I was doing my part for AIDS, how was a ribbon going to?

And now, in the aftermath of the horrible, tragic, unimaginable, and did I say tragic events at Virginia Tech, here come the black "VT" ribbons. (Sigh...) I guess I should respect and understand people's need to wear their empathy on their sleeves (or lapels, or blouses, or bumpers...); heck, I guess I do respect it. But it still bugs me. It's bad enough that I have to be reminded that my children are growing up in a world where things like this can happen. (It's always been that kind of a world. It's the reminder I'm lamenting, not the reality that the world is a dangerous, capricious place.) To add insult to injury, I get to know what this sad, pathetic little person looked like; I didn't need a face to go with this evil, but I got one anyway. Of course, if just knowing what he looked like wasn't enough for some of you, NBC provided you front row seats for the "here's why I killed all those people; aren't I just too much?" show when they aired the killer's little home movie. (Shame on NBC for airing it and shame on you if you watched it.)

Almost before the echoes of the final shot fell still, the blamethrowing commenced. This person or that person didn't do enough or did too much or wore the wrong color shirt that day and we need to fire them or censure them or shun them (unshunning them only when we absolutely have to say something to them) and all in an effort to hold someone accountable when the only one accountable had his finger on the trigger when the gun went "bang!" This was a bad guy. Life is hard for a lot of us, but we make our choices and we follow a path that leads us inexorably to who we are and through what we do in this world. Cho was bullied, he didn't fit in, he had an axe to grind, he was considered unstable. It will probably come as no surprise to my readers that all of that was true of me at one time or another in my past, and despite that fact I have never felt the need to kill anyone over it. (And if I ever do, please, please blame me and only me.)

These days the norm is to fall over ourselves searching for answers, wear ourselves out digging for root causes, and above all to rush madly to find someone to punish for any disruption in the fragile facade that life is easy, that our neighborhood is safe, or (as Hunter Thompson so eloquently put it) "that someone, or at least some force, {is} tending the light at the end of the tunnel."

Whatever or whomever that force is, I bet you it is not wearing a ribbon.