Journal 4-Non-inclusive Disease

Journal 4-Non-inclusive Disease

 

I first heard about this issue from Dean Shareski.  Dean is an Educational Technologist in Canada and I received this communication via a tweet, on, you guessed it, twitter.  Dean's tweet went something like "check out this case of political correctness" so I checked it out.  College students from Carleton University dropped Cystic Fibrosis from the list of organizations that they would be donating money to.  Why?  It has been determined that Cystic Fibrosis is a disease that primarily inflicts white people, primarily men.  Cystic Fibrosis was deemed not an "inclusive" enough disease.  Many college campuses across Canada have an orientation week and during this week students raise money for good causes.  Last year alone Canadian college students raised over $1 million dollars to aid in researching cures for the disease.  Cystic Fibrosis has been supported by college students for 25 years.  Students are now considering rotating charities that will receive money.

    Only one student on the Orientation Week counsel descended.  His name is Nick Bergamini.  Bergamin stated that he feels that this case of political correctness has gone to far.  Bergamini went on to say that the college students were just attempting to be more diverse when in fact they are not supportting people with a disease with the average life span of about 35 years.

    I of course Googled Nick Bergamani.  Like many college students, Nick has a Facebook account.  So, I sent him an email to get his reaction to a couple things.  He did not respond to the email. 

    A later article was published in an online magazine called the National Post. It stated that students were concerned about all the bad press that Carleton University was getting.  Many students started petitions to have fellow students who were in charge of the committee that dropped Cystic Fibrosis from it's charities removed.  Students at Carlton University back petaled and changed their stance on funding Cystic Fibrosis.  I did some deeper investigating and noticed that this topic made it to the Stormfront website.  http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=545980  For those that don't know what Stormfront is, it is the new face of the KKK and their online presence is at http://stormfront.org.  If you are reading this blog post from a school, you most-likely will not be able to get the the Stormfront link. 

    Once again, you just never know.  You never know when an issue will get blown out of proportion.  You will never know it as a student in grade school or college.  You will never know it if you are an administrator either.