Modern Muse: A Bucket of Ice

No Questions Asked

You might remember the summer of 2014. It was a bleak time. Police in St. Louis shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, igniting an explosion of angry and violent protests across The United States. ISIS reared its ugly head, establishing their caliphate across The Middle East. Russia invaded Crimea. Ebola struck the world. And Robin Williams died.

Yet amidst this sad and scary chaos, a strange and heartening phenomenon was born. More than seventeen million people filmed themselves as ice water was dumped over their heads, often by their own hands. Almost half a billion people viewed these videos on Facebook, watching their friends and family and celebrities like Oprah, Bill Gates, LeBron James, and even President George W. Bush and the Pillsbury Doughboy pour freezing water on themselves.

We have Pete Frates to thank for the Ice Bucket Challenge.

Pete was an all-star school athlete and for a short time, a professional baseball player in Europe. In 2012, he was panicked to feel his body struggling to accomplish the most mundane tasks, like buttoning his shirt. Pete had been a home-run hitter, after all. This wasn’t normal. After some frantic Googling, Pete saw a doctor. who after some tests, broke the terrible news to Pete and his family: Pete had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often called Lou Gehrig’s disease after the famous Yankee who suffered from it.

On that day, Pete hatched a Delusional Ambition. He told his doctor he’d raise a billion dollars, a billion dollars to crack a cure for ALS. His family was incredulous.

But Pete meant what he said. Inspired by the ridiculous things he saw folks doing on YouTube, he devised a plan that was perfect for the social media era: he would challenge his friends to donate money for ALS research or dump a bucket of ice water on their head. Donate or douse.

On the heels of his Delusional Ambition, he cracked a plan to start making it happen.

Slowly, the Ice Bucket Challenge spread, thanks, in part, to the connections Pete had with professional athletes. But the Challenge really took off—”went viral”—when one of those athletes, professional golfer Chris Kennedy, challenged his cousin, Jeanette Senerchia, on national television: donate or douse, he said. Jeanette did both, in honor of her husband who was also afflicted with ALS. Soon enough, social media was littered with millions of people challenging each other, pouring water on their heads, and donating money to the ALS Association. The campaign raised more than $200 million worldwide (and even years later, donations are up 25 percent) and some of that money was used for medical research that discovered a gene linked to the disease.4 It’s not quite the billion dollars Pete had imagined, not yet at least, but it’s a great leap toward his worthy goal. 

And, although some critics charge (fairly) that most of the folks watching these videos had no clue what ALS was or why they should care about it, a quantitative breakdown of Google search results demonstrates that the effort did significantly raise awareness of the disease. In fact, searches for information about ALS increased 200 percent during the heyday of the challenge, even besting searches for Justin Bieber one month.5 That said, it’s true that more than 95 percent of folks who participated did not search out more information on the disease.

Think about that: millions of people dumped freezing cold water on their heads without knowing why they were doing it. They did it because they were told to. Some did it because so many other people were doing it. To others, it looked fun. And a small percentage did it for ALS. But they all did it because they were given a blueprint for doing it, crystal-clear directions to follow if you wanted to be part of the phenomenon. They just didn’t do it for ALS.

This was passion and, in some cases, an awful lot of passion minus some reason.

The Ice Bucket Challenge was a triumph of action. People did—and in so doing, they took a leap toward solving the genetic riddle of a terrible puzzle. Is it okay they didn’t really “understand” the disease? Is it okay that that didn’t really want to be bothered learning and investigating? Well, if you’re Pete or Jeanette, no, it doesn’t matter one bit. What matters is what people did.