Those Idiotic Donation "Challenges"

I often rant that cell phone addicts are s addicted because they want to escape reality and replace it with endless "cell connection" time.  But there are other ways people today are escaping from the "cruel world" in which we live. It seems that it's a little easier to run away from a complex world and create a fantasy to replace it. Maybe humans are creating their own comic book characters within themselves.

One of the escape modalities I notice that is gaining favor here in the U.S. (and starting to in other countries, given the power of internet communication) is the charity challenge. The charity challenge is the activity by which a true need is addressed through rather strange "challenges" that donators to the cause/charity volunteer to undertake. Thus, to find a cure for cancer via donations for funding research (it always seems to be breast cancer, which has a very low mortality rate compared to a host of others of which the givers seem to be unaware) a person is asked to march for a cure, or take an "ice bucket challenge", or some other masochistic endeavor.

It's great to raise awareness for charity because it probably does increase donations. But why must people punish themselves publicly before donating? I find it odd. The most idiotic of those challenges is the ice bucket challenge to find a cure for ALS disease. Ever since its inception in mid 2013, it caught the world by storm. The challenge became a mindless trend do to mindless social media. The rules were simple. Within 24 hours of being challenged, participants are to video record themselves being doused with ice water. The reward is a few seconds of "look at me" and recognition for a particular cause.

Under the rules of the ice bucket challenge participants are supposed to announce their acceptance of the challenge followed by pouring ice into a bucket of water. Then the participant can call out a challenge to other people. It spread exponentially. Many prominent western celebrities took this challenge (it help the career when a celebrity is trendy and politically correct). The likes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Timberlake, Steven Spielberg, Robert Downey Jr.,Selena Gomez, Tom Cruise, George W. Bush posted their videos online and supported this good cause. Sigh, how stupid. Just donate money to a cause and skip the theatrics. at least the human sheep aren't being led by a Kardashian girl.

One huge negative to this kinds of masochistic donation is that trendy can lead to another affliction that might need a cure- blindness to truth. One such truth is that bad charities use challenges as a way of subtly tricking the naive to donate their money to a less than worth organization that may pocket more of the donations that it should give to researchers.

As easily led as people are by today's addiction to social media triviality we might see even more extreme "challenges" in the coming weeks. How about this one. At the next party you attend, surreptitiously pee on someone's leg to raise awareness for urinary tract infections. Or, how about shooting yourself in the head to promote gun safety?