Kick the (ice) bucket?

My thoughts on the "ALS Ice Bucket Challenge"  that has been sweeping social media...they've veered all over the place, but have mostly been negative.
At first, it was because of my usual perplexity with these things. Why are they necessary? If you want to give to ALS or anything else, must you dump a bucket of ice water over your head? What exactly does ice water have to do with ALS, anyway? (Hint: about as much as moustaches have to do with prostate cancer, which is to say, nothing at all.)
It gets exasperating, and if this goes on we're going to be tasked with all sorts of weird associations. Let your toenails grow in March for Muscular Dystrophy! Skinny-dip in August for cancer! Shoot friends with paintballs for diabetes! Where does it end?  It's not quite as banal as the breast cancer awareness game, but it's pretty stupid.

And seeing people get all wet, well, you can imagine how little interest that has for me at the best of times. I don't care about dry bodies...making them wet isn't going to suddenly make a difference.

Also, while it's great to see one disease in the spotlight and reaping millions upon millions of dollars...what about all the rest of them? No, I'm not going to in any way imply one disease is "more worthy" than another to be funded...but the United Way was saying there's been a 50% drop in charitable donations, excepting ALS, across the board. Does that seem right?

I will admit some of these videos, which I have watched for research, have been quite creative. And there is the undeniable fact that this viral campaign has worked, well beyond what anybody imagined it would. They're over a hundred million now and sill going strong.

You can't argue with results.

And then, of course, there's this.

A friend of mine who has no qualms about calling me on my bullshit put this on his timeline today and pointed it at me. Here's somebody living with an ALS patient saying that the ice bucket challenge is fantastic because it's got people talking about a disease that nobody talked about before. I had no idea, really, I didn't. How can you live into adulthood without having heard of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis? I mean, granted, it's not cancer, but it's not one of those boutique diseases that kills one in ten million people. It's responsible for one out of every fifty thousand deaths; it's currently invariably fatal; the best drug we have lengthens life by several months. It's also a particularly hellish way to go, locked in a body that gradually loses the ability to do anything at all, including things like breathe.

Now again, it's not the most common disease on the planet. But it *is* something that kills and kills nastily and the fact is it's been very much underfunded until this ice bucket challenge came along. For those living with it, it seems doubly cruel. Not only are you dying, slowly, but next to nobody cares.

The latest attack against the ALS association claims, rather disingenuously, that only 27% of donations are used for research. That may well be the case, but pure research is a small part of what charities actually do. At least as important are professional and public education (you can be sure that most of the people doing this challenge have, inexplicably, no real idea of what they're doing it for); also patient and community service. It's all well and good to find a cure, but we also have to look after the people who are afflicted...don't we?
According to Charity Navigator (hat tip, Rachel, for this fantastic site!), the ALS association is well within the normal bounds for charities, and it ranks very highly in terms of transparency and accountability. There are certainly more shady charities you could be giving your money to.

So give, already. I don't understand why you have to dump water on yourself to do it, but if it helps...