MY MY MY……one of my joys of being part of many aspects within our diabetes community, is that I receive and see notices from everyone. Recently, different organizations touting the 2 much needed-to-be-funded-government programs, the Special Statutory Funding Program for Type 1 Diabetes Research at NIH and the Special Diabetes Program for Indians at the Indian Health Service, represent a significant proportion of the federal government’s commitment to stop the diabetes epidemic that engulfs 26 million Americans with diabetes and threatens 79 million more with prediabetes, were passed by the Senate.
To be completely fair, I am sure many organizations and individuals worked tirelessly on the advocacy efforts in this endeavor.
Someone should say thank you. So to that end, I say THANK YOU to anyone and everyone who played a role as part of an organization or individually; this legislation is crucial and passing the Senate is a ‘big deal’. Your tireless efforts writing letters and passing on strong initiatives via the social media worked, and worked well. Thank you to everyone who played a role as big or as small to accomplish the goal.
—-with heartfelt thanks, Diabetesdad
Now on to the House where it needs to be passed as well.
But a question remains: Would we as a diabetes community have been better served; if diabetes organizations had stated something like; “We are so please to have worked with our colleagues at such and such organization and such and such organization as well as so many individual efforts to have achieved this goal? Had we not joined together as the diabetes community as an entire entity, we would not have achieved this goal. Thank you to all who helped, even if we do not mention you by name, we felt your power of spreading the word. We could not have done this alone, and we didn’t.”
Why could this not been done? Letters and press releases went out only about the individual effort thanking ‘their members’ only. This was an error as The Diabetes Community made this happen and not merely a particular ‘anything’.
Had others not ‘passed on the word’ the word would not have been passed.
I’ll say that again, had others not ‘passed on the word’ the word would not have been passed.
No ‘one-anything’ should be taking all the credit for this effort. How disappointing this was to see. I know many organizations (both large and small) as well as many individuals that fought and fought hard to get the word out about this initiative. This was a perfect opportunity to show the world that we ARE and CAN BE unified as a collective group who care. Unfortunately that opportunity was lost.
At the end of the day; this type of trying to achieve ALL the credit (and not sharing the credit IS THE SAME THING) does not serve us as well as it could. No wonder there is not a unified symbol for diabetes indeed.
We need each other. This is not about EITHER/OR—-learn the word AND.
PLEASE learn the word “AND”.
May we all look at this as a lesson learned how much we need to do and work TOGETHER more closely to make a difference. The world is indeed watching. Together we stand, divided we go no where.
I am a diabetesdad.