The Time of The Disabled
Able folk say that they walk down a street and see someone with a disability...and they flinch...they look away. Perhaps they are made profoundly uncomfortable by what they see. "What if that were me?" they wonder.
The disabled are not here to make the able bodied comfortable. That is not our purpose. We are busy going to work, to medical appointments, on dates, to events that interest us. One of the requirements of our existence *is not* that we make the able comfortable with our methods of speech, of locomotion, of eating, of loving. The fact that it takes us six hours to do laundry, or that we laugh and scream constantly while being transported to a group home or daycare is *our business* alone.
We're ordinary, not the consequence of sin, or automatic saints. We rise up to succeed, or we fail, as the able do.
Adaptive devices and legislation are tools that make an attempt to equalize the opportunities for socialization or employment or maybe just getting into a courthouse to pursue a lawsuit that will make our voices heard on a given issue.
The able bodied have begun to study us and our history as an academic discipline, and that, in and of itself, may broaden the understanding of the economic and social forces that shaped past and present policy concerning us.
My hope for the future of these studies is that the academic voices studying us and our struggles will be disabled scholars themselves, who can inform present choices while studying past policy regardng the disabled.
That's one thing the disabled should make time for: the study of their own.
http://www.ragged-edge-mag.com/
http://www.dsq-sds.org/
(brought to you by speech recognition)
The disabled are not here to make the able bodied comfortable. That is not our purpose. We are busy going to work, to medical appointments, on dates, to events that interest us. One of the requirements of our existence *is not* that we make the able comfortable with our methods of speech, of locomotion, of eating, of loving. The fact that it takes us six hours to do laundry, or that we laugh and scream constantly while being transported to a group home or daycare is *our business* alone.
We're ordinary, not the consequence of sin, or automatic saints. We rise up to succeed, or we fail, as the able do.
Adaptive devices and legislation are tools that make an attempt to equalize the opportunities for socialization or employment or maybe just getting into a courthouse to pursue a lawsuit that will make our voices heard on a given issue.
The able bodied have begun to study us and our history as an academic discipline, and that, in and of itself, may broaden the understanding of the economic and social forces that shaped past and present policy concerning us.
My hope for the future of these studies is that the academic voices studying us and our struggles will be disabled scholars themselves, who can inform present choices while studying past policy regardng the disabled.
That's one thing the disabled should make time for: the study of their own.
http://www.ragged-edge-mag.com/
http://www.dsq-sds.org/
(brought to you by speech recognition)
Labels: Disability
posted by imfunnytoo at 8:00 PM
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