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April 16, 2008
By Liam Rinehart
Staff Writer
After Matt Glowacki introduced himself on April 9, he took no time to get to the point of his talk. Soon, the projection screen in Brookens Auditorium displayed the word “diversity” in large block letters.
“This word should be a verb,” Glowacki said. Going on, he explained what he meant. In his eyes diversity does not just mean inclusion.
“We should learn from people who are different,” he said.
As he explained, we all need to look at our social interactions as a learning process with diversity squarely in the middle. Oftentimes, we fail to realize this which leaves us divorced from the truth of our society and lacking in the proper social experience.
Glowacki is no stranger to diversity, he has had a lifetime of trying,with difficulty, to deal with others. When he was born in 1973, Glowacki was healthy. Mysteriously, however, he was born without legs. As evident through stories of his childhood, he has never let this restrict his active lifestyle. In high school he started his own deejaying company, which now has several employees and serves large portions of his hometown. After college, he earned a position on the USA Paralympic Team for Sit-Volleyball in June of 1998. Thereafter, Blowacki traveled and competed internationally with the team, attending the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney, Australia, and the 2002 World Championships in Cairo, Egypt.
Following a short bio, Glowacki then started to opine on diversity. As he pointed out, there are now more TV's in an average home than people. However, this was not the only statistic he referenced. For example, the average weekly consumption of TV is around 35 hours, which essentially makes it a full time job.
Ultimately, his point was that we need to look at our TV entertainment with an eye for diversity and reality. In order to back up his views, the talk was interspersed with clips from “Family Guy” and “South Park,” which show both realistic and some distorted views of reality.
The overall theme was one of acceptance. Diversity comes in all different types, from racial diversity to the perception of physical disabilities.
Near the end of his talk, he posed some questions. In one, he asked why do we need to become more accepting of those with physical disabilities? The answer, he said is simple. Nearly a third of all veterans coming from Iraq has applied for disability benefits and we are going to have to deal with a growing population of disabled people. As he said right before the floor was opened to questions, “Its only a novelty to you because you haven't experience it before.”
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