Ice Bucket Optional.

Now I'm all for donating to charity and having my money be used to help save hundreds of lives and spare the suffering of hundreds more. However, I'm not so in favor of being coerced into doing it via social media. Yes, you guessed it. I'm talking about the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.

In all honesty, whomever came up with this challenge is very clever. First, everyone actually wants to do it because they were "tagged." This must mean they have friends, or at least one "friend" who could only think of two other people. By having their mom/child video them on the back lawn/bath tub with a bucket of cold, icy water they are showing that their sense of personal charity does not discriminate between fun facebook tags and slightly inconvenient ones. No, they are willing to suffer for a good cause regardless of it's temperature.

And the icing on the cake is, because this is for a good cause it's socially unacceptable to complain about it, shirk it, or commit any other act of avoidance. Not to mention that if you find yourself so easily swayed by facebook-land and it's "rules", you would be bound by the ice bucket gods to pay ten times the amount if you commit the treasonous act of not dumping the entirety of your freezer's ice on your head/lawn/bath tub.

Once you have finally done the deed, you get to extract your revenge upon nominate three more people and spread the goodness infinitely. So in the end the damp coldness of your head and shirt is overshadowed by the warmth in your heart because you really, truly made a difference today.

This whole escapade is flawless, I mean... so long as peer pressure is your weakness and you have one of those magical freezers that will supply you with endless amounts of ice. That is, unless you realize the ice bucket gods don't exist and that you're allowed to donate to any charity you'd like without announcing it on social media. Ice bucket optional.

And yes, this does mean I'm (trying to be) baaaaaaaaack.