During the last couple of months on the Brickyard, you may have seen the chalk writing or table for the Krispy Kreme Challenge: the fundraiser race from the Bell Tower to the Krispy Kreme Doughnuts on Person Street and back to campus. Participants are supposed to run 2.5 miles, shovel down a dozen doughnuts and run 2.5 miles back.Apart from being regarded as a fun University tradition, the K2C derives esteem from its service aspect: All the proceeds are donated to the North Carolina Children’s Hospital. Last year, with 8,000 registrations, $177,000 was donated to the Hospital. The service aspect of the K2C is core to it; on its official website, it describes itself foremost as a “nationally publicized charity race.”

This year’s K2C is on Feb. 8. However, that day, another undertaking in town will be trying to make the world, or at least a bit of it, a better place: the annual Historic Thousands on Jones Street, also known as HKonJ, Mass Mobilization. The HKonJ People’s Assembly Coalition is comprised of more than 125 North Carolina State Conference NAACP branches and chapters and more than 140 other social justice organizations. Since its formation in 2006, it has run “successful voting, mobilization, legal and public awareness campaigns” related to social justice. Its annual mobilization is held on the second Saturday of each February, with thousands marching from Shaw University, through downtown, to the North Carolina General Assembly on Jones Street.

This year’s mobilization is supposed to be the biggest yet. The plan is for a Mass Moral March on Raleigh, drawing on the momentum from last summer’s Moral Mondays and rousing the movement to have even more thrust for when the legislative session starts this year. In fact, the mobilization this year is already being touted as the “most massive moral rally in the South since Selma.”

The Moral Monday Movement was the progressive civil-disobedience-based counterattack against the barrage of right-wing policies enacted by North Carolina’s new Republican supermajority. These policies include: the nationally publicized anti-reproductive-rights “Motorcycle Vagina” bill, a racist voter suppression bill, removing environmental regulations, the repeal of the landmark Racial Justice Act, allowing guns in playgrounds, bars and college campus parking lots, decreasing income tax and increasing sales tax (which is lethally harmful to the less privileged) and rejecting federal unemployment insurance benefits.

Similar to this last policy—which will leave 170,000 out-of-work but job-seeking residents without unemployment benefits and quite possibly impoverished—they have also been rejecting Medicaid expansion. This will leave 500,000 North Carolinians without health insurance (while residents will continue to pay federal taxes that fund Medicaid). Hospitals, predominantly in rural, low-income areas, are being financially strangled by this rejection of funds and have begun shutting down.

This attack on healthcare, and getting Gov. Pat McCrory to accept these funds, is going to be one of the issues most central to this year’s HKonJ.

Now, if you saw someone with a broken bone—a freshly mangled arm, let’s say—it would be a nice of you to offer that person a painkiller. However, with much less physical effort and in just that much time, if you could contribute to getting that person to a hospital, just offering that painkiller would be a vile choice.

That is also the choice between running the K2C and rallying at HKonJ.

Another choice: We could create a society in which the North Carolina Children’s Hospital doesn’t need charity like the K2C’s money. Or we could continue giving charity to the hospital, and that much would still be swell. Sadly, if we choose the second option and don’t try for the first, people are certainly going to die. One K2C can provide some money to one hospital, but there cannot be enough K2Cs to contain the healthcare devastation being wreaked in North Carolina.

So, finally, if you were thinking about running the K2C, a last question to consider: Was your motive to do some good, or just have fun? If it’s more the former, then remember, there’s a better way to do that at that same time. If it’s more the latter, maybe that’s reasonable when just the K2C is in the picture, but when the equation includes HKonJ as well, maybe less so. 

After the power garnered by last year’s Moral Mondays, and looking at some of the worried rhetoric from the government side, ending North Carolina’s war on the poor is possible… if the movement’s impetus carries over to this year. And the most important event to carry that over will be at the same time when we could run the K2C instead.

We can run in all the trifling fundraisers we like and walk away, licking our lips, with a sugar high and the tiniest indulgence of a pat on the back. But the least we can do is reflect on what our choices entail, and not live in denial of their real implications. A sugar-coated reality, when understood for what it actually is, can turn out to be puke-inducing.