Put money where your ice bucket is

It only recently hit me that I’m an adult now. In my mid- to late twenties, I’ve started to feel more at peace with my body and certain in my beliefs. It could be the fact that I’ve got a Master’s degree, it could be because I’ve been doing work on my own terms, or it could be because my Mum posted the below to Facebook, shredding all my illusions that I was still a child to dust.

She messaged me to explain that her status update was a stunt to ‘raise awareness’ of breast cancer, and tried to show me how to donate to the cause. But she’d never copy-pasted on a Mac before, and she wasn’t wearing her glasses, and she accidentally sent me her entire Facebook chat history. In this moment I realised both that I’m a grown man, and that slacktivism isn’t a passing phase in the internet’s evolution, but a cornerstone of the digital age.

It’s scary to think how blind to it we’ve become – how aggressively we follow online trends for no other reason than ‘everyone’s doing it’. As strange as it seems now, those chain emails you had to forward to 12 people before midnight or risk certain death were once a normal part of online correspondence. Throw in a ‘good cause’ and you’ve got an unstoppable force for – if not change, or good – success on social media.

I am of course referring to the Ice Bucket Challenge, a viral phenomenon fuelled entirely by peer pressure and celebrities’ desire to seem like good sports under the guise of helping out the less fortunate. In having a bucket of ice tipped over your head, and donating to charity for the privilege, you get props on two counts: for succumbing to the demands of your peers, and for being seen to be helping a good cause.

I was nominated for the challenge. My response was ‘Go fuck yourself’. I can rain money on any charity I like without having to have a bucket of ice dumped on me, just as part-way through the 40 Hour Famine as a high school student, I realised I could donate to World Vision and still eat the food I wanted. You don’t need to live off barley sugars and delicious fruit juice to know that we should care about poverty, or even that starving would suck; you just need to have a basic grasp on how privilege works and even low levels of empathy.

So why does it take a contrived, publicity-seeking stunt to get us to act on it?

Basically, we’re all like Fry from Futurama: wanting to help others, with the best of intentions and hearts of gold – but if we can do it without having to put ourselves out there, all the better. The success of the ice bucket challenge is less about benefiting a charitable cause and more about keeping up appearances of giving.

As a university student, I took up a job where I would put on a blue T-shirt, paint my face blue, and walk around central Christchurch giving people pamphlets about prostate cancer, with the sole aim of raising awareness during ‘Blue September’. To women who told me they did not have a prostate, I would quickly retort, “Do you know any men you like?”, because it was all about awareness – in the same way that breast cancer is men’s problem, too.

As besides the point as these stunts might seem, the thing is, if they take off, they have the potential to be successful. Very successful. Here’s the point I struggle with. The ice bucket challenge has reportedly raised a staggering $94.3 million USD for the ALS Association in a month. No make-up selfies generated more than £8 million for a UK cancer research charity in six days. The number of people who take part but don’t donate is unknown, but I mean, when you’ve got nearly 100 million smackos – who cares?

READ Megan Whelan’s feature on slacktivism, the ice bucket challenge, charity, and jumping in Wellington Harbour. 

Maybe I’m wrong to assume that it’s more about jumping on a bandwagon than it is benefiting a good cause. Maybe instead of being cynical about the wider impact of my friends and family members taking part in these well-intentioned fads, I should shut up and join them. God knows I’ve got on board with passing crazes in the past (chatter rings, Oddbodz, political youth wings).

It’s their vague motivations that I question. Of the millions of people to have donated to the ALS Association after taking part in the ice bucket challenge, how many even know what ALS is? (Ed.’s note: FYI, a progressive neurodegenerative diseases that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. And, yep, I looked that up just now.) And while I’m glad the Cancer Society and other charitable organisations in New Zealand have benefited from the craze spreading to our shores, it’s just a happy accident.

The casual, sometimes vague way in which these viral campaigns work – the almost incidental attachment to a charity, and the self-congratulatory nature of participating in them – means there’s a disconnect between the craze and the cause. There’s no mindfulness here, and that’s why I get a bit whiney and snobbish, even self-righteous about slacktivism. Stunts like the ice bucket challenge are far more effective at getting people to cough up for charity at than leaflets or lectures, which is good – but only if we know what we’re putting our weight behind, and why. Remember Kony? (…No?)

Meaningful change isn’t just about fundraising alone, even if those figures are substantial. If we want to make a more meaningful contribution to our communities and the causes that benefit them, our charitable giving needs to be more conscious and consistent than emptying buckets of ice over our friends in individual instalments of $10. Raising awareness alone is often criticised as an inadequate response, but without knowledge a bucket full of ice or going without a mascara for one picture isn’t a solution. A consistent commitment to help those that need it whenever you can, however, could change the world.

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