The Ice Bucket Challenge

I was just wondering, when did ALS aka Lou Gehrig's disease hit the forefront of America's consciousness? Everywhere I look now, some other special idiot is dunking ice cold water on themselves or having it thrown on them, video taping the spectacle, and then nominating (daring) some other idiot to do the same. I bet everything in my pockets right now (a stick of gum, a loaded  Metrocard, and about twenty dollars) that more than half of these people have no CLUE what the symptoms of ALS are or how many die from the disease yearly. I bet more than half of them don't even know what ALS stands for and I bet you they don't give a shit. For the majority of them it's just something to do because everyone else is doing it, plus it makes them look like they care which is always important. Everyone from the average citizen to celebrities have done it, been nominated to do it, or are planning to do it. Hell, even Oprah recently did it.

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis is a neurodegenerative disease that affects the nerve cells of the brain and the spinal cord. I know this because I did my homework on this disease years ago because a friend told me she was diagnosed with this killer. Yet I watch these ice bucket challenge videos and no one is stating any facts about ALS before the dunkings. It's like the facts don't matter, just dunk ice cold water on me so people think I'm a good person but I bet they don't know...

As per the ALS Association website:

• The incidence of ALS is two per 100,000 people per year. 
• More than half of the 5,600 people diagnosed yearly live more than three years. 
• People diagnosed with ALS have a life expectancy from two to five years afterwards but there are many that live with the disease for five years or more.
• It is estimated that no more than 30,000 Americans have ALS at any given time. 
• 93% of the patients in the ALS database are Caucasian.

That being said, as much as I am all for killer diseases being fought and as much as I am all for people wanting to do whatever they can to help fund the research to fight those killer diseases. What are these same people doing to fight the most dreaded disease of all, racism? Is there an ice bucket challenge for Mike Brown? For John Crawford? For Trayvon Martin? Where are the ice buckets for Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Eric Garner and thousands of other unarmed Black men murdered by those that swore to protect and serve them? Someone come up with the challenge to do away with racial profiling, racial discrimination, mandatory minimums, or the one for putting the word justice back in the justice system. The system that jails Black people far more and for far longer than whites who commit the same crimes.

Those issues affect far more people than ALS can ever dare to on a yearly basis. While ALS can strike anyone at anytime, a person's skin color can seemingly get them shot and killed at anytime by the police for no apparent reason other than their melanin quotient. So what's more dangerous? What's more lethal? What's more insidious? ALS or being a young Black man in America? You tell me, I'll wait.