Of course, light blue could mean something else. Graves' disease, for instance, or irritable bowel syndrome. Surely there's no love at first sight quite like that when two people wearing irritable bowel bracelets bump into each other on the Metro.
With so much to care about, there aren't enough colors to go around. In fact, some colors are so tortured by concern and afflicted with disease, Amnesty International has been notified. Take yellow.
Remember when yellow meant bring our hostages home (Iran '79)? Now yellow may refer to spina bifida, equality, missing children, bladder cancer, Amber Alert, suicide or endometriosis. So much for sunny.
To minimize confusion, caring colorists have resorted to nuance and shading. A different shade of blue makes more than a shade of difference. Imagine your embarrassment if you mistook a Reye's syndrome causist (blue blue) for a myasthenia gravis victim (light blue/teal). Today's compassion requires a whole new etiquette.
The point of all this originally was to raise awareness and money for cancer. The Lance Armstrong Foundation and Nike teamed up to sell $1 yellow "Livestrong" bracelets in honor of Armstrong, a cancer survivor, during his sixth consecutive win in the Tour de France.
Other foundations and activists latched on and - one hopes - have nearly exhausted the trend. You can probably figure the awareness bracelet has passed the tipping point, jumped the shark and is riding a dead cliche to an apocalyptic finish when the featured bracelet at awarenessdepot.com (no kidding) is a black-and-white wristlet that says "God Bless The Dead."
I'd say that about covers it, though I'm still waiting for the invisible bracelet to raise awareness about the problem of awareness bracelets. In the meantime, children are learning the important lesson, certain to help them advance in America's corporate, human-resource culture, that publicly displaying one's virtue is a virtue in itself.