This letter is regard to the article that appeared in Wednesday's Collegian entitled "Greeks raise awareness by dining with disabilities." While I applaud the efforts to raise awareness about disability issues, the method of using disability simulations has a tendency to be misleading and can be offensive to people with disabilities.

Wearing a blindfold while eating or attending class in a wheelchair does not represent what it is like to live with a disability. At best, it demonstrates what it is like to have a handicap rather than a disability. For example, a blind person eating a meal has developed successful strategies over time, whereas during a disability simulation, a sighted person is minus those strategies and therefore may struggle.

As a result, disability simulation too often helps to construct the fallacy that life with a disability should be overcome and is something to be pitied, which reinforces negative stereotypes. As a consequence, this activity can deny people with disabilities the inalienable right to live their lives with dignity and self-respect. For the non-disabled person, after the simulation props are gone, he or she walks away with a misguided sense of superiority disguised as gratitude for not having a disability.

As a person without a disability, I will never be able to presume that I know what it is like to have a disability. However, in my capacity as an ally, I felt I needed to respond with a different perspective.

Karin Skogerboe Bright

Resources for Disabled Students

To be frank, I am quite tired of Matt Hitt's pointless complaining. Concerning Monday's column, Hitt is upset because drunken students were issued tickets for underage drinking. He brings up no new relative information about the incident; he makes the erroneousness argument that just because college students are going to drink, they should be immune from laws, and he just complains for 500 words. Is this what an opinion column amounts to now? He thinks, no he believes (thinking was not involved in this column) things should have occurred differently just because he disagrees with them.

Message for Mr. Hitt: Welcome to the real world; take a step off campus and face it. Whining and complaining isn't going to change something you don't like something or disagree with for frivolous reasons.

It is the impression of this reader than Hitt is merely a child without a grounded concept of reality or what to do when you don't get your way. Please stop whining.

Christopher Jordan Ortiz

Senior, technical journalism major