For my English-speaking friends… I have been unfair on my Twitter account, with the amount of Spanish-spoken tweets. You see, in the country where I was born, when we all thought things couldn't get worse, they did.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, I will first share an amazing video by @andreina_nash that does a pretty good job at explaining what's going on in Venezuela in a nutshell.
WARNING: there are graphic images in this video… and THIS how life in the cities of Venezuela is like today.
But the lessons from the movie, where an ad executive helps create a controversial media campaign opposing military dictator Augusto Pinochet during the referendum on his presidency in 1988, go well beyond lessons that Venezuela should adopt in an effort to rid Venezuela of the impoverishing politics that have plagued it since Chavez and Chavez-influenced governments have been in power.
At the Diabetes Hands Foundation we have always seen IDF as a beacon that we've aligned our views and goals with, being as they are, a representative of people touched by diabetes worldwide. However, when I first saw this video I felt profoundly disappointed, as a patient and as a diabetes advocate. While I understand that they want to appeal to the general public and governments about the urgency of the diabetes epidemic, not only does the message in the video fail to do this (it is not directly targeted at those two targets -it is living in YouTube and propagating via social media): it conveys a very disempowering message, a message devoid of any kind of hope.
Diabetes does not kill: let's please stop using this language! Complications from uncontrolled diabetes do (this is not my idea, but me amplifying what amounts to the gospel by Dr. Bill Polonsky). I invite our friends at IDF to reconsider this approach, thinking how people around the world feel when they are fist diagnosed with this condition: what if the message you first hear about it is that diabetes kills? Is that the first thing they want people to hear? Our anger about government inaction needs to be driven differently: painting diabetes rosey is far from what we are talking about, but fear-driving tactics don't work either and can ultimately alienate a very important support platform IDF has built up over the years.
@askmanny we need this video to be seen by gen public and decision makers. We have different messages for different audiences.