I don’t like being the dissenter, the party pooper, or the person who sees a bandwagon coming and gives it the middle finger, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. It’s for this reason I have to get something off my chest that’s been bothering me for a couple weeks now: I think the Ice Bucket Challenge is dumb.
For those of you aren’t familiar with the rules of the Ice Bucket Challenge:
Within 24 hours of being challenged, participants are to video record themselves in continuous footage. First, they are to announce their acceptance of the challenge followed by pouring ice into a bucket of water. The bucket is then to be lifted overhead and poured over the participant’s head. Then the participant can call out a challenge to other people.
In one version of the challenge, the participant is expected to donate $10 if they have poured the ice water over their head and donate $100 if they have not. In another version, dumping the ice water over the participant’s head is done in lieu of any donation.
Now I know from all the YouTube videos the Ice Bucket Challenge is supposed to raise awareness for ALS. Well, I hate to the bearer of bad news here, but I’m still not any more aware of ALS than I was before the act of recording yourself getting soaked by a bucket of ice water went viral. I have no problem admitting that I’m ignorant, but I don’t think I’m the only one. I can’t help but wonder how many people actually know what ALS even stands for—whether they’ve taken the Ice Bucket Challenge or are merely one of the spectators like me. Since #IceBucketChallenge has been trending on Twitter, could someone give me a symptom of this condition? Who suffers from ALS? How does the Ice Bucket Challenge actually help those suffering with ALS?
After doing a little research, this is what I’ve found out about ALS:
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. Motor neurons reach from the brain to the spinal cord and from the spinal cord to the muscles throughout the body. The progressive degeneration of the motor neurons in ALS eventually leads to their death. When the motor neurons die, the ability of the brain to initiate and control muscle movement is lost. With voluntary muscle action progressively affected, patients in the later stages of the disease may become totally paralyzed.
As for who gets ALS:
ALS is a disorder that affects the function of nerves and muscles. Based on U.S. population studies, a little over 5,600 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with ALS each year. (That’s 15 new cases a day.) It is estimated that as many as 30,000 Americans have the disease at any given time. According to the ALS CARE Database, 60% of the people with ALS in the Database are men and 93% of patients in the Database are Caucasian.
Most people who develop ALS are between the ages of 40 and 70, with an average age of 55 at the time of diagnosis. However, cases of the disease do occur in persons in their twenties and thirties. Generally though, ALS occurs in greater percentages as men and women grow older. ALS is 20% more common in men than in women. However with increasing age, the incidence of ALS is more equal between men and women.
If you aren’t sufficiently astounded, let me put it in laymen’s terms. ALS affects your voluntary muscle movements like waving hello, signing a check, or doing lunges at the gym. Eventually, the muscles that control those functions will waste away because of the degeneration of the neurons that ALS causes. In many cases, a person suffering with ALS might maintain their senses of touch, smell, sight, hearing, and taste, but will not be able to move. As silly as the Ice Bucket Challenge may seem, this truly is a condition that little is known about and it’s worthy of our attention.
People have been calling this latest social media craze “slacktivism.” Well, that might be accurate if it hadn’t made much of a difference, but it has:
As of Monday, August 18, The ALS Association has received $15.6 million in donations compared to $1.8 million during the same time period last year (July 29 to August 18). These donations have come from existing donors and 307,598 new donors to The Association.
I’m thrilled that The ALS Association has raised all that money, but on some level isn’t a little disappointing for The Association that what convinced people to donate money wasn’t a heightened awareness about the seriousness of the condition or a renewed sense of determination to make a difference in the world, but because an opportunity to make a YouTube video came up because someone challenged someone else to dump ice water over his or her head?
Let’s be completely honest here—the Ice Bucket Challenge may have been prompted by ALS, but the real reason this campaign was so successful was because celebrities started doing it, and we realized this challenge was great Instagram fodder. Who doesn’t want to watch a video of freezing cold water being dumped on someone? And who doesn’t feel cool/rebellious starring in a video in which ice cubes come raining down on his or her head? The appeal has only increased since it’s gone viral, because now taking the #IceBucketChallenge means you’re a part of something that’s allegedly for a good cause with the added benefit of more views on your YouTube channel and some new Instagram followers. If your video is crazy enough, you might even appear on BuzzFeed!
Have you seen some of these videos? They’re comedy gold. You get to see people struggling to lift the buckets. People are getting in the head. Some people are just plain creepy. Women have decided to wear skimpy outfits in some instances.
It’s fascinating to see how activism and charity is changing along with technology. Maybe these silly, viral campaigns are the best chance at getting the word out there in the world we live in today. I’m glad the ALS Association is benefiting from our narcissism. The ALS is getting its name and message out there (somewhere), and famous people along with us common folk get the opportunity to document a bucket of water being dumped on our head. For better or worse, it seems like a strange win-win situation, but that doesn’t make it any less dumb. When this craze is over, I imagine donations to the ALS will probably drop significantly, and that’s a real shame.
