Walgreens, Disability Rights, and Predicting the Future

In yesterday's post on innovation, the ODEP article referenced Walgreens as an example of a company that has benefited from both innovation and universal design. Walgreens does indeed have a strong mission to promote diversity (at least with respect to disability). Possibly due in part to the fact that its Senior VP of Distribution and Logistics Randy Lewis has an autistic son.

There is a video of Lewis I really wanted to find and share that was shown at the misguided career workshop, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find a copy online. The thing that struck me about the video was that Lewis gave an extremely jarring mix of social model disability rights talk (workplace accommodations and universal design can conquer all!) and painful medical model fatalistic moaning (so-and-so will never _____).

It's a bizarre thing where on one hand there's a lot to applaud about Lewis and Walgreens in terms of promoting social model thinking and disability rights initiatives. On the other hand, there is some wondering of whether it's understood that workplace accommodations are in fact the direct result of angry disabled people rebelling against that exact notion of "you will never ____."

As I was ranting around my cognitive dissonance, my companion noted that this may be what happens when people adopt a set of ideas without understanding where those ideas came from. Who knows if that's actually the reason behind what I observed in the video, but it's a possibility. Disability rights activists have accomplished a lot in terms of a civil rights movement, and yet typically nothing is mentioned in history classes. Is it that people, even people who are involved with disability things, just don't know?

Being realistic about limitations is really important. But a limitation is not the same thing as an activity. I may never comprehend numbers. But being unable to comprehend numbers does equate out to never graduating from college with a science degree or having job that involves numbers. It just means I had to find a different way of getting there. No one can, or should try to, predict my future or anyone else's future.

No, I'm not going to make Walgreens or Randy Lewis out to be The Bad Guy because of a handful of "will never _____" predictions in a video. But the issues are still worth examining.