You’re sitting in class, and a torn notebook page with a little note inside is passed along through your hands to the next. However, you don’t even take the time to look and have no idea what message you have just spread. How silly, to do something without knowing the meaning. A similar phenomenon has just swept through about every Storm student’s Instagram feed with the recent ice bucket challenge.
Many students may remember the earlier 2014 challenge when we dumped ice cold water on our heads for what we thought was innocent fun. However, the “challenge” was started with the original intention of spreading awareness about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) disease, which affects about 5 per 100,000 people worldwide and leads to possible paralysis and eventual respiratory failure.
As children, we had no responsibility to understand the purpose of the original challenge. But as we now grow into teenagers, and even into adults, it isn’t right for us to just complete the challenge without discussing the reason it started.
As we grow from childhood and into our teenage years, it is vital that we take responsibility and understand the depth of the actions in which we take. Many students at our own school participated in the recent 2025 ice bucket challenge, created by students at University of South Carolina’s Mental Health Illness Needs Discussion (MIND) club. The challenge was designed to raise awareness for mental health, as well as raise funds for supporting organizations. In the videos spreading awareness for this cause, people simply dumped water on their heads and tacked on the #SpeakYourMIND hashtag with ease. By doing this, few people understood or took the time to understand what they were spreading awareness of.
For both the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and the USC Speak Your Mind Challenge, the point was to spread awareness for important causes, and as participants in doing so, we should know what message we’re spreading. Living as Summit students with such fortunate lives, it is essential that we take the time to give back when we can and fully understand the impact we can make.
There’s no excuse for ignorance at this point in our lives; in order to properly spread awareness for an issue, we must take the time to truly understand the situation at hand.
