(FORTUNE Magazine) – It is August 5, 1993. Like millions of other politicized citizens, your servant is tuned in to CNN, watching the House of Representatives in that cliffhanger vote on the Clinton budget. He sighs dismayedly as a couple of fence sitters gain instant fame by changing to ''Aye,'' and the budget gets passed by 218-216. Searching for an epigram to punctuate the moment, he is suddenly transfixed anew by the TV screen. Before CNN can exit, its cameras are picking up a guy in the well of the House, talking at machine-gun speed and broaching a bizarre new proposition that sounds like doubletalk. He wants August to be National Scleroderma Awareness Month. At least it seemed bizarre at the time. We now know that scleroderma, a disease in which fibrous connective tissue gets into the skin, has been in the awareness big leagues for several years. To be sure, these big leagues tend to be expansive, like baseball. Pursuant to various congressional resolutions, Clinton has recently proclaimed Mental Illness Awareness Week and National Disability Employment Awareness Month. A news release on our computer screen solemnly states that the IRS office in Denver memorialized Rocky Mountain ) disabilities by asking its managers to go through a day performing their tasks as if they were deaf, wheelchair-confined, or whatnot. Also in the computer are Nexis-based references to awareness weeks and months for prostate cancer, breast cancer, Down's syndrome, domestic violence, baby safety, AIDS, homelessness, homeless children (a separate entry), migraine, youth gangs, back pain, sleep-related disorders (said by the National Sleep Foundation to affect members of every race, social class, and age group), and bats. Our own view is that anyone actually raising his awareness levels for all these problems would be sunk in depression, even if he hadn't shown up in Manchester, England, for the Rambert Dance Company's performance of ''Spirit,'' an exercise that not only celebrated migraine awareness but actually aimed to simulate the head-throbbing world of sufferers. Somehow not one's idea of a jolly evening. Wait. We shouldn't have implied that bats are a problem. Only old folks think that. Soon after Governor Ann Richards of Texas proclaimed Bat Awareness Month, Merlin Tuttle of Bat Conservation International was explaining in the Los Angeles Times that bats are mainstays of the ecosystem. ''A colony of 150 big brown bats can protect farmers from up to 18 million or more root worms each summer,'' said Merlin. He did not address the question of why the Great Ecology God created root worms in the first place. Possibly you detect a querulous tone creeping into this item. That is because we are tensely approaching the part where the meaning of it all gets explicated. Ready? We cleave to the view that no problems get solved by ''awareness,'' and that those proliferating proclamations reflect the New Age sappiness now infiltrating public discourse and elevating caring and concern to primacy among the virtues -- a phenomenon also evidenced in such diverse follies as sensitivity training sessions, conglomerates running commercials to say they ''care,'' and the no-taunting rule in football. In fairness, however, we would concede that this harsh judgment does not apply to Badminton Awareness Week, recently celebrated in British Columbia.