Have you ever thougt about the signal effect of a label? Or a tag?
Just think of it. When you were born, the midwife or nurse immediatly gave you a label. A plastic bracelet around your wrist and maybe one more around your leg. Inside the plastic pocket she placed a small piece of paper with your mothers name, your date of birth and maybe your name too, if you had one. In Czech Republic they even tag the poor baby with a special pen on the thigh, with the mother's name, just to be sure.
If you ever go to a festival, you'll probably get tagged with a similar bracelet. Maybe with a color code if you have special permissions during the festival, or belong to a defined group.
In the western world, a bracelet around your wrist means eighter that you're a patient in a hospital, or a normal person who paid for admission to a peticular place or happening.
Another way to tag people when you bind a small piece of paper around the big toe. Yes, when the person is diseased. A photo of a bare foot with a label fastened with a string is quite powerful. You know that this person isn't alive anymore. You might have aversions to have a label like that on yourself. It might makes you feel bad.
So what about the labels? I went to Thailand six and a half years ago. For a huge scout camp, a so called "World Jamboree". 30 000 people gathered on a beach for eleven days. Everything was ready for the camp of our lives! We were all given a plastic bracelet with a plastic pocket to put a identification paper in, as usual in such big gatherings. The command was clear: Wear it, or you'll be asked to leave the camp immediatly. There was only one problem. For the thais, and for most of the other asians, this wrist-label was synonymous with death. A bracelet like this is mostly used to label dead people in Asia. A lot of young people was forced to wear something they felt belonged to the dead only. It's like if we where admitted to a hospital and the nurse tagged us with a toe-tag instead of a bracelet... I can just imagine how it must have felt for the asian scouts..
Strange, though, I wasn't labelled when I was admitted to the hospital in april. I think they just forgot it.
