Tattoo You
Immunity?
I lived overseas for a few years and spent some time in a few third-world countries where poverty, hunger, and disease are everyday worries for the vast majority of people who lost the birth lottery and were born there instead of somewhere like Canada.
When I moved back to Canada I was really taken aback by some of the abject poverty right here in Vancouver. I can logically process families eating out of dumpsters in a Venezuelan barrio but not here in YVR. It’s not that I had never seen the homeless in Vancouver before. Far from it, but when you see it day in and day out I think we get an immunity of sorts going on. Combine that with images of all the other bad shit going down in the world and it’s like our brain effectively shuts out all the images of starving kids with distended bellies and flies buzzing around their eyes—replacing the things we don’t want to think about with reality TV, celebrity watching, and everyday life.
We live in a busy, information fuelled world that allows us to think for a brief second how terrible it must be for the less fortunate then quickly moves us on to what to make for dinner, what the Kardashians are wearing, or how do beat the traffic so we can catch the last 10 minutes of your kids soccer game. Is it our brain protecting us or is it information overload?
Talk to any charity worker and one of their biggest challenges is awareness. How do you get people to actually stop and pay attention for more than a few seconds?
The Experiment
This brings me to a social experiment I read about yesterday.
The Social Tattoo Project was started by three interns at a big advertising firm who were tasked with coming up with a project on awareness. They came up with an idea to make awareness permanent by actually tattooing causes on volunteers. The interns would allow their twitter followers to vote and the cause with the most votes would be permanently etched into the skin of a volunteer regardless of how the volunteer feels about the cause.
Here is a sampling of some of the comments on the socialtattoo website.
"To all the people who have gotten tattoos and are a part of this, YOU ARE AMAZING. I love the idea behind Social Tattoo and the people who have offered a small part of their selves to raise awareness and capture something that affects us all forever. Thank you so much for starting this. My one question: Where can I sign up to get in on this? I’m at your disposal."
"Being someone who is pretty well covered in tattoos, I would never take part in this. I want to choose my own art for my own reasons. I would never let a bunch of anonymous hashtaggers on Twitter determine what will permanently be on my body in script. The heart is there, the idea is novel, but its lasting impact will fade like Sharpie marker on a palm. Or like knuckle work. Choose your own metaphor. I think it’s heartfelt, but a bit silly."
Personally I am not buying in to the idea. I don’t have any ink but all my friends that do say it’s an extremely personal expression. So, while I agree that empathy is fleeting I am not so sure that tattooing a random hash-tagged world crisis on someone is any kind of answer. It’s a novel idea but I think its effectiveness is limited.
I don’t have any answers to the immunity that our minds create. What we try and do with ethically hip is provide people an opportunity to support local charities by doing something they would likely do anyway – shop! More importantly, we try and raise awareness by shining a light on some of the great causes like the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society.
Album cover art from Tattoo You - Rolling Stones (1981)
