Not many people know that Pete Frates, who inspired the Ice Bucket Challenge (IBC), was a baseball player from Beverly, MA. We take our local baseball pretty seriously round these parts, and Pete was a local baseball legend long before he was a hero.
I didn't know Pete well. Even though we both lived in Beverly, I met him via my friend. And in that one meeting I learned a story of Liberty that keeps me going to this day.
He played his high school ball at St. Johns prep in Danvers, MA and then 4 years at BC, where he was the captain of the baseball team his senior year.
For those of you who truly know baseball, you know the guys who make it to the majors are beyond good. Pete was a great player, and if hustle, heart and love of the game had been what made an all-star, he would have been drafted in the first round.
Pete played summer ball in MD, CT and HI while in college and after graduation went to Germany and played professional baseball there. It's a hard life to make a living in baseball when the MLB just doesn't have a place for you.
Hard never stopped Pete.
Even when he got the diagnosis in March of 2012 at the age of 27. Even knowing that only 10% of ALS patients lived 10 years past their diagnosis. Even knowing the future, Pete set his feat and swung for the fences. He and his family started the Ice Bucket Challenge, and those who knew and loved spread the word. And the movement grew.
Pete married his sweetheart Julia in 2013 and their daughter Julia was born in 2014. By that time, the IBC had already passed over $200m in donations and included such luminaries making public shares as Bill Gates, Oprah, Ryan Seacrest, and Elon Musk.
The impact of the IBC is measurable. Clinical trials of new treatments increased by 50% over the next few years.
And all this happened because people cared. There's a lot to wonder about with ALS. Why are US Military veterans twice as likely to get ALS as the general population? Why in 90% of the cases is their no family history of ALS? All of these questions are being answered because people voluntarily chose to give more money to solve this issue. It was people, and not government who took the lead in this fight.
And this has happened before. Polio was cured by people donating money voluntarily to the march of dimes. We can do the impossible together. We can solve the biggest problems together as a group. If I get to choose how my money is spent in fighting science battles, I'm much more likely to donate more, rather than throwing my money into a black hole of "taxes."
And we have changed ourselves as a people when we say "that's what I pay taxes for." We should feel a voluntary obligation to each other. The idea of "there but for the grace of G-d go I." When we have a world where we all acknowledge our bond to each others through the shared human experience, we have a world with more love and empathy.
Abstracting caring for each other to "paying taxes" makes us a more distant and colder society. I believe that we are meant to love each other as we can, and when we remove that idea of being our brother's keeper voluntarily, we diminish ourselves.
So 8 years after after I got the IBC, I'm happy to think back on the legacy of Pete Frates. I think about the power of voluntarily working together. And I dream of the day when we all become invested in doing good directly, rather than ceding the implementation of moral behaviour to a government that has shown itself to be unworthy of that trust.