Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy: Doing stupid things doesn’t support “charity”

Dumping ice on people’s heads has little or nothing to do with raising money for charity, despite all the propaganda about this recent craze.

Now that politicians, like Chris Christie, are getting in on the act it will almost certainly do more to give them good publicity while they pretend to support a good cause while simultaneously cutting funds for more efficient ways of providing money for worthy causes.

This is part of a long trend of things that are allegedly done to promote awareness and raise money for charity but do far more to raise money for propaganda and charity profiteers than they do for any actual cause.

I didn’t need to do any in depth investigation to figure this out. The vast majority of these activities that surround these events have nothing to do with directly helping with a charity of any kind, whether it is dunking people with ice water shaving heads, doing long walks or runs or many other events.

Some of these activities might be good community activities but they rarely raise much money for charity but they often do involve selling a lot or merchandise saying they do.

Some of these types of activities have been exposed by numerous media outlets, although they’re usually when those without political power do them; however a close look at the things that higher profile activities being promoted by the media indicates they’re doing the same thing and the people selling all these promotional items are often doing it for a profit.

This is part of a herd mentality that social psychologist spend an enormous amount of time researching and they often share that research with for profit advertisers and political organizations that study how to manipulate crowds.

Regardless of why this craze has become so popular these psychologists and sociologists are almost certainly studying it along with the foolish "fire challenge" some teens are getting involved in. I don't know whether or not all the attention for one form of foolishness might encourage crowds to go along with another form of foolishness that is even more dangerous but I don't need a research project on the subject to know that if social psychologists want to encourage the herd mentality for something it should be for more educational or productive activities even if they don't all do the same thing.

This may be easy to get large crowds to go along with because it doesn't take any brains and seems funny; whether stupidity is funny or not when it goes viral it's still stupid.

Real charities or political organization is done by people that take more time to think through how to actually accomplish any given goal.

Instead of spending their time dumping ice on their heads and following foolish crowds they accomplish something worthwhile.

Sorry to be a wet blanket, but this ice bucket challenge is just a gimmick

Edit 08/27/2016: The latest movement to draw attention to a cause now seems to be the twenty-two push-up challenge, which is for a good cause like many other issues; however it does little or nothing to teach about the causes of suicides among veterans or to point out that our government is constantly lying to the public sending these veterans to wars for all the wrong reasons, which is surly one of the major causes for it.

A major part of the reasons for these suicides is almost certainly the same reasons why many veterans also have problems with domestic abuse and even go on shooting sprees, which is far more common than most people realize as I pointed out with additional sources, in Barack Obama betrayed Police Veterans and Blacks and Teach a soldier to kill and he just might.

One of the biggest contributing causes to escalating violence is early child abuse that teaches children to deal with their problems through violence; and it also teaches them to blindly obey order and believe what they're told. This escalates in school with bullying and hazing and it escalates even more in the military where they study how to develop boot camp indoctrination tactics to teach blind obedience so they can send cadets to war without question.

When many of these veterans learn they've been betrayed by their own government and they're surrounded by people that support deceptive propaganda and use intimidation and hype to reinforce it that is virtually guaranteed to be a contributing cause to high suicide rates.

There may be a handful of veterans that join this and get counseling that might help but the hype may distract from far more productive solutions including education about the causes of depression and suicide; and when some people fall for more hype and later realize that it doesn't work it might even contribute to even more suicides.

One of the most important solutions to this problem is to simply stop sending troops to fight wars based on lies. This could be followed up by creating local economies instead of outsourcing to protect profits for the same corporations that profit off of the illegal wars.