Pepsi Refresh Proving Me Wrong

While I'll tell you that I am a realist, I know what I really am.

I am a pessimist. I am a cynic. Sometimes that makes me, plainly put, an a-hole of the nth degree.

When My Love told me Cure JM Foundation was applying to be in the running for $250,000 grant through the Pepsi Refresh Project, I told her not to hold her breath. A million other organizations would be applying as well.

When word came July 1 that the application was accepted and that the world would be voting on Cure JM's proposal online, I told her not to get too excited. Only the top two vote-getters out of 278 finalists would win the quarter of a million dollars. Cure JM is a tiny, all-volunteer organization created around a disease that only 3 in a million kids are diagnosed with every year in the United States. While its base is passionate, it's minuscule, I told her.

The odds of Cure JM winning, like the odds of your child actually developing juvenile myositis, are exceptionally and astronomically poor.

Seven days into the voting, the Make Juvenile Myositis a Memory application is ranked 13th in popularity.

Thirteenth.

Out of 278 applicants for $250,000.

Holy shiitake.

I need you good folk of the Internet to do me a favor.

I need you to prove me wrong.

You need to do nothing more than go every day this month to the Make Juvenile Myositis a Memory application page, click the "Vote for this Idea" then either vote by using your Facebook sign-in or creating a unique sign-in based on a valid e-mail address. Takes less than a minute a day to do and costs you not a cent.

If Cure JM wins, every bit of that $250,000, which represents about half of the money Cure JM normally raises in an entire year, goes either to fund research studies or to support the doctors and scientists who help children with juvenile myositis at "JM Centers of Excellence" the foundation has help set up in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Please lend a hand -- vote daily, Tweet, Facebook, grab a widget (like the one I have at the top right of my home page) -- every little bit helps.

If not to prove me wrong, then to prove there's hope for kids like:

Parker, diagnosed at age 4

Gracie, diagnosed at age 10

Mason, diagnosed at age 17 months

 

and, of course, Thing 1, diagnosed age 2.5

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This is the video I put together for the application. You can spot me lurking in the background of one of the last slides.