Haters Gonna Hate

I have enjoyed watching a collection of random people I know douse themselves with ice water over the past week or so.  And it's been all the more enjoyable to know that they are also giving money to ALS research.  It has just seemed like an organic sort of social media feelgood story.  Until, and I guess I shouldn't be surprised by this, someone found fault.
"They're all wasting perfectly good water," they said.
"They just want attention," they said.
"They don't really care about ALS," they said.
"Lighten the frack up!" I say, using Battlestar Galactica terminology, to imply the emphasis of a profane statement in a PG rated sort of way. (and also because I love BSG)
And of course this was not an isolated incident of hater-a-tude.  There were many who decided that those buckets of ice water would really be appreciated in Africa somewhere, or in drought-stricken places like California, which I suppose they would, if someone were inclined to seal it up and mail it to Africa.  But that would cost approximately three to ten times as much as actually purchasing a small filtration system like the ones our Presbytery in PA used to buy for churches and villages in Rwanda, which will provide clean drinking water for a family indefinitely, a single Sawyer Point One water filter can be rigged up with two five gallon buckets to create a gravity fed water filtration system that will produce over 500 gallons of clean water per day and has an expected lifetime capacity of - get this - one million gallons.  Seriously, here's where Cabelas sells something similar to campers and doomsday preppers for $72.99.
So yeah, the $100 that people gave to ALS, might also have gone to a project that supports clean drinking water, but here's the thing: there are a lot of good causes and things that need support out there.  But the idea that the people who took the ice bucket challenge were somehow wasting water that could have helped people without access to drinking water is on par with your parents telling you about all the starving kids in China who would just love those brussel sprouts you hate.
Better yet, instead of hating on all the people who did something silly and fun with good intentions, you could just decide to quietly give money yourself, without fanfare and without writing a sanctimonious blog post about how you're so much better than all those ice water people.
I'm not going to tell you if I'm giving money to anything here, because I'm already being sanctimonious enough.  But I do want to make a point here: the internet can do wonderful things, but it can also, almost in the same breath, totally ruin beautiful things.
The interweb gives me daily reminders of the rather precarious balance between good and evil that is built into human nature.  In places like Ferguson and Gaza, brutality is being unmasked and victims are being heard from behind walls that would have heretofore been nothing but the silence of oppression.  Legitimate outrage is being amplified by a global awareness of the things that are wrong with our treatment of one another.  Discussions and dialogue happen at lighting speed, and you may think that awareness of the sort raised by silly acts of hashtag activism or "slacktivism" as it has come to be called by those who are #holierthanthou, has had and will continue to shape our human awareness.
Look at the events in Ferguson, as opposed to what happened in the 1990s in the LA riots, there is much more evidence of understanding by the outside world, there is information, there is accountability and generally things are shaping up to be less violent.  There are stories about the legitimate protesters stepping in to stop looting, there are stories of solidarity in the community and from places all around the country.  Does all this mean that the situation is rosy?  No, the whole mess is still an open wound, which has forced some of the most pernicious and systemic issues of injustice that afflict our nation into an uncomfortable spotlight.
The flow of information that allows us to see this, and gives a voice to the victim, also gives a voice to those who would like to call the people of Ferguson "animals" and paint them as lawless thugs, rather than a community which has been grieved by brutality once too often.
I guess the only real truth is that the Interweb gives people a voice, it gives voice to people who are oppressed and it gives voice to the oppressor.  It gives people who are kind and thoughtful a voice, and it gives people who are narrow and bigoted a voice as well.
Here I am, like Demosthenes, speaking to the ocean with my mouth full of stones.