Neither do I eat babies, nor am I an advocate of child cancer. But I have to ask: Is the Krispy Kreme Challenge more of an evil than a good?

I think the fundraiser does good. The amount of $177,000 for the North Carolina Children’s Hospital can literally make the difference between life and death, many times over. That value is incalculable. But there can be degrees of incalculable: The value of saving a hundred lives is much less than the value of saving a thousand lives. The K2C, despite saving those hundred lives, breeds a mindset that sacrifices thousands, making itself more of an evil.

Most fundamentally, certain messages are implicit in K2C’s model. And as the K2C is one of N.C. State’s two premier “service” events (along with Service Raleigh), these messages are normalized for the entire campus community. This has dangerous effects.

There’s that notion normalized, that your share of contributing to society can be fulfilled just by devoting one or two Saturday mornings every year. Or even that, because of the acclaim garnered by the event and the feel-good, conscience-coddling effect it has (while fun remains the prime motivator to take part), such an amount of “service” is the ideal. But the major problems of our society cannot be solved by one-off, self-congratulatory, “service”-fundraiser-shindigs. Poverty, war, environmental menaces, etc. need collective, sustained organization and action to be solved, and they will only be solved by normal people like us. But by making the K2C one of the two large-scale “service” events conducted by students, the idea is normalized that the only, or at least the best, way to make a difference in the world is through one-off events. Anything that perpetuates such a myth will only do more harm than good to the world.

The same can be said of fundraisers, which do nothing but reinforce the notion that if just enough money went to the right causes, everything could be corrected. But the deepest of our societal problems are those of the illegitimate exercise or concentration of power. And power concedes nothing without demand, as Frederick Douglass said. Fundraisers couldn’t have won us independence, universal suffrage, the eight-hour workday or civil rights. But here’s the K2C, presenting charity as The Way to do your bit for society.              

Put simply, the more people buy into the idea of doing good through the K2C and its ilk, the worse we’ll be in the long run. The more people “do their bit” for the world by taking part in lone fundraising “service” masquerades, less will be our chance of, say, defending our civil liberties or preventing ecocide.

Now, someone might say that children’s illness is a reality that cannot be removed, so donating to this cause is an act of good. I agree that children’s illness isn’t a problem like poverty or war — I don’t see humans discovering a cure for disease any time soon — but I argue that this feature of the K2C, that it donates to help out sick children, makes it even worse. 

Yes, children’s illness isn’t a problem that persistent activism can solve, and thus, for the cause of helping sick kids, it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect that from people. But the pretense of the K2C is that this is how “service” in general works (rather than “service” for redressing children’s illness). So, the effect the K2C has is that of sending out the message that just since this issue can be ameliorated by one-off events, and can’t and shouldn’t require un-abating action, no causes would require this. 

And regardless, even if children’s illness isn’t something that can be done away with, we can do away with social conditions in which people can’t afford to keep their loved ones alive — whether it’s because of a screwed-up healthcare system, or because of inequality and poverty, both of which are features of this society. In this sense, the money generated by the K2C is only a Band-Aid solution. In fact, by keeping this problem in check through donations, it creates the impression that action around the root of the problem — unaffordable healthcare and poverty — isn’t as necessary, and thus it perpetuates an unacceptable status quo. 

The appeal of doughnuts and bandwagons shouldn’t deter us from doing the greatest good.