Okay, so I’m about to expose myself as a grumpy old curmudgeon but I will admit it: I didn’t wear red scrubs to work on Friday. The reason was simple. I actually don’t own any articles of clothing that are red, because it makes me look washed out.

I actually got a little tired of answering the question, “Where’s your red?” Finally someone handed me a National Wear Red Day sticker to wear. The sticker came complete with the two corporate logos of Macy’s and Merck. Guess what, folks? The national wear red campaign is a marketing campaign, meant to bring higher awareness to women’s heart health, but also to bring a higher awareness to its corporate sponsors.

Does not wearing red mean that I don’t support heart health for women? Of course not. Like I said, I don’t actually own any red, but the the thing that bothers me is how willing people are to jump on the bandwagon and not really think about why they are doing it. It reminds me of those ubiquitous pink ribbons that symbolize the fact that you hate breast cancer. I mean isn’t it obvious? Don’t we all hate breast cancer by now? But now people use the symbol more often than not to sell products, and so as a symbol it has become kind of meaningless.

Am I too cynical? Maybe. But maybe I just like to expose this world of marketing that lies beneath the surface of your reality. Another example is the Discover Nursing campaign by Johnson & Johnson. Do you think a bunch of marketing execs got together and said “What type of cause would we most like to benefit today?” More likely it was the other way around, as in, “Which cause would most likely benefit Johnson & Johnson?” Again, I’m not knocking the actual campaign. I’ll leave that to the Center for Nursing Advocacy. The campaign has perhaps done some good over the years but they don’t do much to address the real problem, which is that there’s a shortage of nursing educators, more than there’s an actual shortage of nurses.