Which do you think is more odd – professional football players wearing pink gloves, shoes, and pads or hedge funds and financial types wearing blue jeans to work on a Monday? Before you answer consider a few things: First, did you think that it was odd to see NFL players in pink on Sunday? Second, did you ask why they were wearing pink? If you’re like me, the answer to both is yes, and by now you’ll know that the pink was to highlight breast cancer awareness month. Definitely, a successful attention getter.
Pneumonia kills more children than any other illness and yet hardly anyone talks about it. To make matters worse we have the tools to prevent most of those deaths but lack the political will to make their use a priority. In short, it’s a disease desperately in need of attention. In an effort to kickstart the effort, Lance Laifer, whose ideas have sparked terrific progress in awareness and action around malaria, proposed that everyone wear blue jeans on World Pneumonia Day, November 2nd.
His first calls have been to hedge funds on Wall Street where wearing blue jeans on a work day would really be something unusual – as unusual as Brett Favre wearing pink shoes. With any luck, the hedgies will provoke people to ask, “Why blue jeans today?” and this in turn will provoke a discussion on pneumonia and what can be done about it.
Despite the success of the pink NFL campaign, Lance’s successes with malaria, and the ease of a simple act to wear blue jeans , there’s been criticism of the ‘blue jeans’ pneumonia awareness idea. Reuters blogger Felix Salmon was told by Lance that the link to the color blue was related to the bluish color that kids get before they die of pneumonia. (For the medically inclined, this bluish coloring is called cyanosis and it occurs when a child becomes hypoxic because of the oxygen depletion that comes with pneumonia and the inability to breathe.) Salmon’s criticism characterized the idea as somewhere between “ineffectual” and “downright offensive”.
For my part, the rant should be against inaction, not those striving for change. If Salmon and others want to be outraged I would urge them to direct it toward those in power who have been standing by and watching while preventable, treatable deaths continue to occur at the pace of one every 15 seconds. So, why not put blue jeans on before you go to work on November 2nd and find out whether it works for pneumonia like it worked for breast cancer and the NFL? Maybe Salmon’s criticism, should be that blue jeans aren’t blue enough….it is just possible nobody will notice, just like a child lost every 15 seconds.
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The goal is not simply to wear blue jeans, but to build a marketing campaign of sorts around it, distributing information and participating in a shared charitable event. Its effectiveness is not limited to the idea itself, but to the commitment of participants to open their hearts.
The Best Shot Foundation is proud to support Blue Jeans Day and we encourage all to wear blue jeans on November 2nd, World Pneumonia Day.
David Rubenstein
The Best Shot Foundation
www.best-shot.org
follow the Best Shot Foundation on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Best_Shot