October is Supranational Awarenesses Awareness Month

I'm not sure if you were already aware of this but this month is Vegetarian Awareness Month. It is also National Pork Month.

Back in 1977, Vegetarian Awareness Month started off as World Vegetarian Day but it expanded over the last 35 years to take up a whole month. During that period, meat consumption in the U.S. has gone up by about 44% and meat consumption in China has gone up almost tenfold.

Look at it this way: between them, those two countries ate 60.5 million metric tons of just pork last year (so excluding chicken and beef). If the average pig produces pork meat from 56% of its body weight then you would need to start off with more than 108 million metric tons of pig to end up with 60.5 million metric tons of meat. 108 million metric tons is equivalent to 108 billion kilograms. If each pig weighs 150 kilograms, then the math says China and America ate 720,000,000 pigs last year. If you killed a pig every six seconds and never slept it would still take you 1,200,000 hours (137 years) to match that output. So yeah, that's where bacon comes from.

Anyway, my point is that pigs are being killed at a ridiculously unprecedented rate despite vegetarians expanding their day into a full month and running raffles that pay people not to eat meat. National Pork Month is mopping the floor with World Vegetarian Day/Vegetarian Awareness Month, especially in China where National Pork Month doesn't even exist (since the National in the name refers to the nation of America).

You could interpret the numbers above to mean that vegetarian month needs to be expanded to the full year and I'm sure a lot of PETA activists would agree with that sentiment. Contrariwise, I think the real explanation is that months like Vegetarian Awareness Month are not as effective as their founders hoped and I think the biggest reason why is that there are so many causes out there competing against each other for awareness (read: donations). October alone has the following causes competing for attention in America: vegetarianism, pork, clergy, fetus/infant loss, domestic violence, Filipino history, LGBT history, German history, Hispanic history, Italian history, Polish history, cyber security, dwarfism, celiac, health literacy, lungs, teeth, down syndrome, infertility, lupus, physical therapy, spina bifida, Rett syndrome, SIDS, blindness, medical ultrasounds, 3D ultrasounds, mental illness (one week only), pharmacists, fair trade, the arts & humanities, auto battery safety, and breast cancer.

The whole awareness month thing is getting out of hand. My awarenesses of all these causes have swelled to the point that my emotional and mental connections to reality have been crowded out. I keep forgetting to eat because I'm so focused on societal concerns. My attention is spread thin like butter scraped over too much toast. Toast! I am literally starving to death while I write this. I tried to drive to the grocery store to get some food but I kept crashing because I'm constantly distracted in the car by all the causes I need to keep at the front of my mind. I desperately need April to roll back around so I can re-familiarize myself with the perils of distracted driving through the power of Distracted Driving Awareness Month.

It's clear we need an Awareness Ministry to impose some order and logic on all these attempts to raise awareness. There are only twelve months to go around and the number of "good causes" approaches infinity. Aspiring raisers-of-awareness should be forced to start settling for single days for their causes because there are at least 365 of those every year. If we only need one day to celebrate Jesus's birth then I'm pretty sure that auto battery safety doesn't need a full month.

When two diseases have already claimed the same month for awareness (like sickle cell anemia and prostate cancer have done with September) then the Awareness Ministry can encourage them to reach an equitable division of the month by threatening to arbitrate the issue if they fail to resolve it themselves.

Hey, remember when Earth Day was still a thing?

Aspiring raisers-of-awareness should also note that a lot of causes are not something that you should only care about a twelfth (or less) of the time. For these movements, the awareness month route might not be the most appropriate one. Only being aware of the scourge of sexual assault and its inherent badness for 1 month each year is never going to be good enough. Other ones, like Earth Months that promote recycling, are akin to only going to the gym for one month each year: you are not going to get the long-term results you are hoping for because over 90% of the time you are neglecting a process that is supposed to be ongoing year-round. A paternalistic Ministry of Awareness could help prevent these sorts of missteps by sharing its institutional experience with organizations through its Advisory Division. Its oversight could also help avoid situations like the one described above where two lobby groups (pro-pork and pro-pig) are going to head-to-head and cancelling each other out.

The Awareness Ministry is badly needed in public schools especially because children get a new cause thrown at them every day and they just don't even have the capacity to cope yet. There is a strong correlation between the increase in the number of causes that have started to demand awareness over the last 4 decades and the increase in the diagnosis of children's mental illness, autism and ADHD rates. Children being told to worry about eleven new problems every month on a recurring schedule might not be too much for their undeveloped brains to handle. Just saying.

Some children don't deal well with adult issues

An Awareness Ministry could regulate how many people you need to get to sign up in order to validly declare claim an awareness month for it. Right now, what is the quorum? How many likes do I need on my Facebook page before I can petition the government to declare Bieber Fever Day? How many more do I need to petition for Bieber Fever Week? What if I am only looking to name an hour? Can off-peak hours be obtained at discount rates?

The Awareness Ministry could easily fund itself by leasing different bits of the year to different causes. They could be auctioned off like wireless spectra have been in the past. Right now, different causes and movements are laying claim to pieces of the calendar without regulation and it is like the Wild West of community organizing. Those bits and pieces of the calendar should be the sole property of the Crown with no squatters rights. Once this is established, government can allocate such a scarce resource in a utilitarian fashion where the months, weeks, days, and hours are distributed to those who value them most, i.e. via auction. Then, once they are all distributed, the Awarness Ministry must regulate them to ensure that they are not being devalued through abuse and misuse.

We need bureaucrats to set down guidelines that will enable us to figure out which months best suit which organized movements and make sure they are evenly distributed across the calendar. We need more months, days, and weeks that exploit date/disease synergy like rare diseases being spotlighted on February 29, a rare day. For example, wouldn't it make more sense for Skin Cancer Awareness Month to be moved from May to July in the northern hemisphere so that it occurs when the UV Index has its highest average measurements? And is there a good reason why January has so few causes associated with it? Is it because no one much cares about the plight of others when they overextended their charitable muscles in December and the freezing weather is making everyone miserable? The Research Division of the Ministry of Awareness could provide an answer to this question so that causes can make decisions about which time periods they want to lease with full and equal information.

The Awareness Ministry must be able to penalize impostors that falsely lay claim to the right to spread awareness of their preferred movement during a certain time period that belongs to a different charitable foundation. Currently, if someone incorrectly and falsely proclaims that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month in Ontario then they would be distracting from the Ontario legislature's unequivocal decree in the Brain Tumour Awareness Month Act, 2001 that October is for brain tumour awareness. The problem is that right now the Brain Tumour Awarness Month Act has no teeth; any breast cancer activist can contradict the will of the people as expressed by its democratically-elected parliamentary representatives by stating that the abstract concept of October should be linked to tumours located in the breast when we should only be cognizant of tumours in brains at the moment.

It is important that the pith and substance of the Awareness Ministry fall under the federal government's power pursuant to s. 91(2) to regulate trade and commerce because it would be self-defeating if the provinces could sell the same date to different causes within their jurisdiction. For example, Manitoba has already awarded April to sexual assault awareness. That's an important subject but is it really a top twelve option?* If other provinces start handing out April to causes that aren't sexual assault awareness then Canadian citizens traveling across this fine country are going to be confused when April is dedicated to a hodge-podge of different social movements. One day you are in Quebec and April might be a tribute to collective bargaining rights. Then the next day you are in Alberta and all the ribbons are for gout. Finally you arrive in Vancouver and you find everyone talking about the importance of seatbelts but when you call home to Nova Scotia and your Mom wants to make sure you've gotten the HPV vaccine. Then you read this article and find out that April is Distracted Driving Awareness Month in Ontario. (Don't tell me you forget already?!?)

If everything is an important cause then nothing is an important cause because importance is a question of relative degree. So what are you waiting for, Mr. Harper? Establish the Awareness Ministry already! Then, once that is done, Canada should endeavour to draft, sign and ratify an International Awarenesses Awareness Treaty so that our collective consciousness can be properly directed at the correct cause during the applicable month not just as a nation, but as a globe. Only then will we have achieved the pinnacle of awareness. Thank you and god bless.


*: In case you were wondering, the favourites to qualify as the top twelve causes that would secure a month for themselves in Canada are currently as follows: 1) Cancer (excluding lung); 2) Veterans; 3) Heart disease/stroke; 4) Diabetes; 5) Alzheimer's; 6) LBGT Pride (would synergize with HIV/AIDS awareness); 7) Women; 8) Suicide (camouflage for much broader mental health movement); 9) Aboriginals; 10) Environmentalism (mostly climate change with a few blurbs about the importance of recycling/waste reduction); 11) Children's welfare (would talk mostly about healthy eating, the right to play and early development but its aces in the hole would be the quiet-but-weighty anti-pedophilia and CAS wings of the movement); 12) Labour (obesity would take its place during the next 18- to 25-year lease period due to a continuing trend of declining size and stature for unions and an increasing trend of size and stature for bellies).