Refusing to be Wet and Generous

I have escaped the Ice Bucket Challenge and turned down quite a number of “invitations.” 

 

My logic for not joining this global splash stunt in the name of “charity” initiated by carnival-obsessed Americans goes like this: you don’t need to slice yourself and draw blood in order to understand the misery of China’s human rights during the Qing dynasty and “share” the agony of some ill-fated Chinese victims executed by the Death of a Thousand Cuts. Nor do you need to fill yourself with a cucumber in order to have “empathy” for the thousands of prisoners being sodomized by guards while languishing in the dark cellars of Third World countries. Even if you do and want to tag three pals to do the same or make a donation, you can experience the pain, or explore the pleasure—depending on your sexual preference—in your own bedroom, rather than video-taping your climax and posting it on the internet. If the empathy turns into an orgy and you have a fresh discovery of a new sexual fetish, congratulations.

 

Dumping ice water and breaking fresh cucumbers, if done in a form of global mass hysteria, are both a stupid waste of natural resources. Why not save a few buckets of fresh water for some poor Chinese peasants in Ganxu, and save the cucumbers for a salad? If “pain” is shared in a global euphoria, with an “I’ve done it” short film clip and a good laugh, then the “sharing” of pain and the “liking” of it with a thumb sign on Facebook transforms physical pain into a global party of sadism and masochism. Some Filipino Catholics perform a crucifixion stunt every Easter. I can “share” the deep pain of Christ through the Bible as much as understand what kind of conditions the wheel-chair-bound Stephen Hawking lives in via news pictures. To strike a nail into my palm for 30 seconds or pour a bucket of ice water over my head? Don’t count me in, and thank you very much.

 

There used to be an age when feelings could be conveyed in words. Literature like Dante’s “Divine Comedy” could have acted, with the vividness and power of its poetic language, as a deterrent against crime with its books of the “Inferno.” And one could watch a play to arouse compassion in, as Aristotle puts it, a catharsis of emotion. Only in an era of indifference and illiteracy would a mass need to “share” every pain by temporarily experiencing it, before turning it into a grotesque combination of a cheap talent show and mock-equality. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and many other Americans have bravely frozen themselves, so you should follow suit. But what about the Pope and Queen Elizabeth II?