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Government ad in poor taste- Thoughts on the Yellow Ribbon

Imriel

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Hello everyone. I searched the forum to see if this issue had been raised before, and I couldn't find it. If it has, my apologies. I am a civilian who appreciates what you people do for Canada and for the world.

Some of you may have seen this ad campaign run by the Alberta government, about traffic safety. I'm all for traffic safety, but I found their choice of symbol offensive, as will you, I think. I wanted to share the following email exchange I had with them, because as you will see, they didn't see a reason to consult with anyone connected to the military.

"Join the fight against bad driving. You are the cure."

I see this billboard every day on my way to work. That seems like a good, if weak message. When I see the traffic line formed into a yellow ribbon on the billboard it makes me angry.

The yellow ribbon has long been meant to show support for loved ones serving in the military. At some point they made pink ribbons for breast cancer, which was fair. That is a serious disease that kills many. Then a whole bunch of other causes came out with their own ribbon colours, most of which were pretty forgettable. This has had the distasteful effect of diluting the meaning of these ribbons.

And now you put out these ads which don't just use another generic ribbon, they use a yellow one. The yellow ribbon on the back of our vehicles is not there to remind us not to speed!

It would be bad enough if it was some random misguided organisation that did this, but to have the Alberta Government steal a symbol like that is beyond incredible. What's next, are you going to use poppies to remind us to file our tax returns on time?

Out of respect, I ask you to please return this meaningful symbol back to what it belongs to, and remove it from your campaign. Surely the vast resources of the government can come up with something more original.

Thank you for your comments regarding the radio advertisement "The Cure".

Traffic safety is a top priority of the Alberta government. Each year, over 400 people lose their lives on Alberta’s roads and over 26,000 are injured.

This campaign is about getting drivers to take responsibility for their actions behind the wheel. Since 90 percent of collisions are due to driver error, it’s crucial we change the way drivers think and act when they’re on Alberta’s roads. Research shows many drivers have serious misconceptions like over-estimating their driving ability, down-playing the likelihood of being seriously injured in a collision, "it's always the other guy" attitude or thinking that traffic safety laws are optional. Unsafe behaviours such as speeding, not stopping at stop signs, not using seatbelts, impaired or distracted driving are attributed to “other drivers.”

The campaign’s aim is to address driver attitudes and personal accountability when it comes to traffic safety in Alberta. The cure for safer roads is up to us as individuals. This ad is designed for people to recognize that it is individual personal responsibility as road users to self-reflect and improve our driving behaviour.

People need to think as themselves as part of the solution. None of us think of ourselves as bad drivers but the carnage on our roads keeps happening so who is responsible for this? The Cure campaign reminds drivers that each and every one of us are accountable for our actions.

Through our communications agency the cure concept was tested on focus groups of Albertans and both yellow and orange ribbons were researched when designing this campaign. Through testing, the ribbon and cure concept was one that made people self-reflect on their own driving behaviour – a very challenging result to achieve.

The yellow/orange color of the ribbon for the billboard was carefully selected and was intended to reflect dotted street lines. The following causes were associated for each colour:

Yellow - Prevention of Teen Suicide, Support for Troops’ and Families

Orange - Addiction Recovery (in Canada), New Democrat Party, Self Injury Awareness, Anti-Racism, Freedom to Own Guns

The symbolism of the ribbon helps communicate that traffic safety is an important cause in Alberta and that people can contribute by improving/correcting their driving habits and being accountable for their actions; thus the tagline “The Cure is You”.

We are always conscientious of the materials we’re proposing which is why we went through rounds of public testing as well as vetting the chosen concept through both the Alberta Cancer Board and Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation to alleviate any potential sensitivities.

The Alberta government recognizes that motor vehicle collision and casualty rates are unacceptable and is committed to introducing initiatives to achieve a significant and measurable increase in road safety over the next few years. The Traffic Safety Plan (TSP) responds to the recommendations of the McDermid Report, Saving Lives on Alberta's Roads. The TSP and the McDermid Report are available through the department's website at: http://www.transportation.alberta.ca/3112.htm

The advertising that you heard is part of the education and awareness component of this plan. The plan is viewed as one way to motivate drivers to adopt more safety-conscious driving habits by increasing their awareness of driver attitude and behaviour when traveling on Alberta roadways.

Thank you for your comments on this campaign.

No doubt it saves time to copy and paste pre-written paragraphs that address common concerns. The problem is that my concerns haven't been addressed. I'm all for a campaign that promotes better driving, so I don't need the spiel about it. It's simply the choice of a symbol that offends me.

You mention that you checked with the Alberta Cancer Board and the CBCF for sensitivities. Why? It isn't their ribbon that you're stealing. Did you check with the Legion? Did you check with the Military Family Resources Centres? Did you check with the PPCLI regiment?

Thanks again for your comments on "The Cure" campaign.

The Alberta Cancer Board and Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation were consulted as the poster
that supports this campaign makes a direct comparison between the over 400 traffic deaths that
occur each year on Alberta roads to the number of lives lost to breast cancer in Alberta each year.

The groups that you mention in your email were not consulted as the color was not the same bright
yellow associated with military support and was meant to represent roadway paint. There is considerable
difference in the colors and enough variation that we did not feel it necessary to consult with the military and the
associated groups. I have attached samples of the colors that we are using as well as the color associated
with the yellow ribbon.

The Cure campaign was initiated with the best intent, to reduce the over 400 people that die and more than
26,000 injured on Alberta roads each year.

Thank you for your comments to the government website.

So I'm asking you all if you find this disrespectful. Maybe I'd make a bad interior decorator, but I didn't notice that the ribbon was "yellow-orange" instead of "yellow" until they pointed it out. I don't think the colour is distinct enough.
 
If anyone needs a visual, here it is:

Driver_Attitude_Cure_Billboard_copy.jpg


I don't really see it as offensive or stealing the military's yellow ribbon.  The color looks to me like that of the lines painted on the road.
 
There are soldier support ribbons in camoflague and national colours also. I really can't get upset about them using it. Freedom, and the freedom of choice, in a democratic society is what those troops we remember are fighting for.
 
If you guys are ok with it, then that makes me feel better. I just wanted to ask. Thank you.
 
Not that I cared either way about them using it, but I really didn't notice a difference in the colour...
 
A yellow ribbon in the past usually referred to anyone who has been away for a long time, not just military.  We've used it in the past but it was never 'ours' to own or dictate how it was to be used.  If anything, I thought the green camo one was 'ours'.

 
A ribbon's a ribbon. There are lots of people who smack a ribbon on their car, call it 'support' and then forget about it.

As long as it gets the message across, who cares?

On a side note, orange is the ribbon color for the both the NDP and the 'right to own guns' groups...does anyone else find that rather funny?
 
Seems to have multiple symbolic uses:

Recently, it has been used to symbolize support for the International Suicide Prevention Program and to raise awareness of Testicular Cancer, Endometriosis, and Madeleine McCann.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_ribbon

 
PanaEng said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tSEFUiC1hk
Perry Cuomo.
sings about paying his debt to society... so, I don't think it was originally associated with military service.

cheers,
Frank

Frank,

They were singing about yellow ribbons and soldiers well before Perry Como was even born. The song tying it to homecoming convicts is very recent by comparison to the original songs.
 
I figured that but was too lazy to search further - I was not trying to say that he wrote it though.

do you have a source to the original lyrics/writer?

cheers,
Frank
 
The following article (from the Library of Congress) may answer most questions about "yellow ribbons".


How the Yellow Ribbon Became a National Folk Symbol
http://www.loc.gov/folklife/ribbons/ribbons.html (Library of Congress)
by Gerald E. Parsons

This article was originally printed in the Folklife Center News in the summer of 1991 (Volume XIII, #3, pp. 9-11). At that time the Persian Gulf War had inspired Americans to decorate their lapels and their front porches with yellow ribbons for the soldiers sent into combat, once again generating a storm of questions to librarians and folklorists about the origin of the custom. An article written ten years earlier, just after the Iran hostage crisis, Yellow Ribbons: Ties with Traditions, is also available on this site.

The late Gerald E. Parsons was a folklorist and a librarian in the Folklife Reading Room for twenty-one years. 

During the last decade, no single form of expression documented in the Archive of Folk Culture has stimulated more letters, more phone calls, more in-person inquiries than the yellow ribbon. The questions began in 1981 when the Library of Congress received a blizzard of inquiries, particularly from the news media, about the history of yellow ribbons then being displayed everywhere in America in support of Americans being held hostage in Iran. The basic question that reporters had in mind was how the symbol came into being. Many callers had ideas of their own on the subject; some had interviewed the authors of relevant popular songs; others had spoken to wives of hostages in Iran in 1980-81. Still others had talked to historians of the Civil War.

Eventually a body of information accumulated, and I wrote an article for Folklife Center News entitled "Yellow Ribbons: Ties with Tradition" (volume IV, no. 2, April 1981). The article outlined the symbolic use of the ribbons in story, song, and real life; and the Folklife Center staff made good use of the article this year [1991], ten years after its publication, when a second blizzard of questions came in about the ribbons displayed for soldiers serving in the Persian Gulf.

Is the custom of displaying yellow ribbons for an absent loved-one a genuine American tradition? That question was, and remains, "number one" on the American Folklife Center's hit parade of yellow ribbon reference inquiries. Often this same question has been asked in a more focused form: People will say, "Is this a Civil War tradition?" --as if an association with that central experience in American history would certify its authenticity.

In the last year or so, we of the reference staff at the Center have become aware of a certain shift: a movement from asking about a Civil War connection to asserting one. Some assertions on this subject have verged on the pugnacious; nearly all have made reference to the song "Round Her Neck She Wore A Yellow Ribbon." That song was recorded for the Archive of Folk Culture in 1938 by Sidney Robertson Cowell in California, but it is much older. For example, there is a Philadelphia printing from 1838 that copies still older British versions. Indeed in the last act of Othello, Desdamona sings one of the song's lyric ancestors.

One version or another of "Round Her Neck She Wore A Yellow Ribbon" has been popular now for four hundred years; so it would not surprise me to learn that someone sang it sometime during the Civil War. All I can say for sure, however, is that it was sung in a movie that was set in the western United States at a time just after the Civil War--a 1949 release starring John Wayne and Joanne Dru. In fact, Round Her Neck She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (the movie) took its title from the song. This film remains the only demonstrable connection between yellow ribbons and the Civil War that has come to my attention, and that a rather weak one.

If the custom of wearing or decorating with or displaying yellow ribbons doesn't trace to the Civil War, where does it come from? It begins, as far as I can tell, not as a custom at all, and not as a song. It begins as a folk tale--a legend, actually. Here it is in the earliest version I've found:

It is the story of two men in a railroad train. One was so reserved that his companion had difficulty in persuading him to talk about himself. He was, he said at length, a convict returning from five years' imprisonment in a distant prison, but his people were too poor to visit him and were too uneducated to be very articulate on paper. Hence he had written to them to make a sign for him when he was released and came home. If they wanted him, they should put a white ribbon in the big apple tree which stood close to the railroad track at the bottom of the garden, and he would get off the train, but if they did not want him, they were to do nothing and he would stay on the train and seek a new life elsewhere. He said that they were nearing his home town and that he couldn't bear to look. His new friend said that he would look and took his place by the window to watch for the apple tree which the other had described to him.

In a minute he put a hand on his companion's arm. "There it is," he cried. "It's all right! The whole tree is white with ribbons."

That passage comes from, of all places, a 1959 book on prison reform. The title is Star Wormwood, and it was written by the eminent Pennsylvania jurist Curtis Bok. Bok says it was told to him by Kenyon J. Scudder, first superintendent of Chino penitentiary. I take this information as evidence that the story was in oral tradition as early as the mid-1950s. I note also the implication of a certain occupational interest in the tale.

During the 1960s, the returning prisoner story appeared in religious publications and circulated in oral tradition among young people active in church groups. In this environment, both the versions that appeared in print and those collected from oral tradition highlighted similarities to the New Testament "Parable of the Prodigal Son."

In October of 1971, Pete Hamill wrote a piece for the New York Post called "Going Home." In it, college students on a bus trip to the beaches of Fort Lauderdale make friends with an ex-convict who is watching for a yellow handkerchief on a roadside oak. Hamill claimed to have heard this story in oral tradition.

In June of 1972, nine months later, The Readers Digest reprinted "Going Home." Also in June 1972, ABC-TV aired a dramatized version of it in which James Earl Jones played the role of the returning ex-con. One month-and-a-half after that, Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown registered for copyright a song they called "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree." The authors said they heard the story while serving in the military. Pete Hamill was not convinced and filed suit for infringement.

One factor that may have influenced Hamill's decision to do so was that, in May 1973, "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" sold 3 million records in three weeks. When the dust settled, BMI calculated that radio stations had played it 3 million times--that's seventeen continuous years of airplay. Hamill dropped his suit after folklorists working for Levine and Brown turned up archival versions of the story that had been collected before "Going Home" had been written.

In January 1975, Gail Magruder, wife of Jeb Stuart Magruder of Watergate fame, festooned her front porch with yellow ribbons to welcome her husband home from jail. The event was televised on the evening news (one of the viewers was Penne Laingen). And thus a modern folk legend concerning a newly released prisoner was transformed into a popular song, and the popular song, in turn, transformed into a ritual enactment. Notice that Jeb Stuart Magruder's return to his home exactly parallels the situation in both the folk narrative and the popular song. The new development, at this point, was that Gail Magruder put the story into action.

The next big step was to make the ribbon into an emblem--not for the return of a forgiven prodigal--but for the return of an imprisoned hero. And that step was Penne Laingen's: On November 4, 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held Ambassador Bruce Laingen and the rest of the embassy staff hostage.

Six weeks later, on December 10, the Washington Post printed two short articles by Barbara Parker: "Coping With `IRage'" and "Penne Laingen's Wait." The first article began "Americans are seething" and went on to quote psychologists concerning the widespread and intense emotional distress caused by the hostage crisis. The article presented a helpful list of things to do to "vent irage": "ring church bells at noontime . . . organize a neighborhood coffee to discuss the crisis and establish one ground rule only: no physical violence . . . play tennis and `whack the hell' out of the ball . . . offer family prayers or moments of silence . . . turn on car headlights during the day . . . send gifts to the needy `in the name of the hostages,'" and, of course, the old stand-by, "conduct candlelight vigils."

Then in the Post article come the words "Laingen, who has 'tied a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree'. . . suggests that as something else others might do." The article concludes with Penne Laingen saying, "So I'm standing and waiting and praying . . . and one of these days Bruce is going to untie that yellow ribbon. It's going to be out there until he does." According to my current understanding, this is the first announcement that the yellow ribbon symbol had become a banner through which families could express their determination to be reunited.

The next major step was to move the ribbon out of the Laingen's front yard and into most of the front yards in the United States. That move came about in a particularly American way. With a wonderful exhibition of the spirit that Alexis de Tocqueville thought was a cardinal virtue of our society, the hostage families met and formed an association: the Family Liaison Action Group (FLAG). FLAG quickly found allies among existing humanitarian organizations, most notably an organization called No Greater Love.

The goal of FLAG and its allies was to find a way to bring moral force to bear on behalf of the hostages. They seem to have formed their strategy around Emerson's maxim that "A good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands." The symbol they choose for their argument was, of course, the yellow ribbon. Aided by support from four AFL-CIO unions, No Greater Love made and distributed ten thousand "yellow ribbon pins." These went to union members, members of hostage families, college students, and in a stroke of marketing genius, to TV weather forecasters. Meanwhile FLAG sent the pins to Junior Chambers of Commerce, scouting organizations, and governors' wives.

Ultimately, the thing that makes the yellow ribbon a genuinely traditional symbol is neither its age nor its putative association with the American Civil War, but rather its capacity to take on new meanings, to fit new needs and, in a word, to evolve.

And it is evolving still. During the Persian Gulf Crisis, for example, there emerged a new impulse to combine yellow ribbons with hand-painted signs, American flags, conventional Christmas ornaments, seasonal banners, and other such elements to create elaborate, decorative displays--displays that one scholar has termed "folk assemblages."

Because the yellow ribbon is very much a living tradition, there is no way to tell who among us may help to steer its course, or in what direction. Last winter, I was in a distant city and needed to buy a spray of flowers. I found a flower shop and explained to the proprietress that I needed an arrangement that would be appropriate for a cemetery ornament. "And would you like some yellow ribbon to tie around it," she asked matter-of-factly.

Well, it's a long way from a folktale about an ex-convict's homecoming to an incipient funeral custom. I had to stop and think about that for a minute. But never one to thwart the evolution of a new American custom, I said, "Yes, ma'am. I will take some yellow ribbon. Thank you."
 
The 'Support the Troops' and the 'Teen Suicide' ribbons are the same colour? Badass, oddly ironic, and should no doubt have some kind of weird appeal for Gen Xers....  ???
 
So there we have it. And it seems to be pretty authoritative.
And as the writer indicates, traditions are always evolving - who knows what it will be in 20 yrs.

Thanks Blackadder
 
I still prefer the poppy as a symbol of remembrance and support, in truth I don't care if someone else uses a yellow ribbon for something because I don't especially like the yellow ribbon in general.  I don't disagree with the sentiment, just would prefer a more unique symbol than another coloured ribbon.

I get it that the poppy is for remembrance and 'supporting our troops' is different, but to me the poppy, or a canada flag pin, or something else more uniquely canadian is something I can get behind, not just a ribbon in a primary colour that apparently has multiple meanings.

*shrugs*
 
I tend to favour the cadpat ribbon with Support Our Troops in gold and the  :cdn:.  Pretty straightforward as to who you are supporting.
 
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