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Don't Feel Sorry for the Disabled |
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Why We Should Not Feel Sorry for People with Disabilities Much of what the non-disabled majority believe about people with disabilities is that they are poor, frail, and most commonly, that they are a group to be pitied. In spite of the benevolent, sometimes well-meaning presentation of such beliefs, it is in fact the opposite of how the Disabled feel they should be treated. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Americans with disabilities have a strong desire not to be patronized or treated as especially heroic or courageous, but to be treated as true to life human beings as normal as everyone else and largely given an equal chance to struggle to achieve and pursue happiness. The belief that the Disabled are overachievers to be pitied largely springs from the view that disability status is a sad fact of life or a necessary evil. If I believed that having a disability were a sad fact of life, I too (had I been born non-disabled) might see pity as the major emotion for people with disabilities. At best such people believe living in a world with some disabilities is a necessary evil. If I believed that having people with disabilities in the world were a necessary evil the best emotions I could think of for people with disabilities are a sympathetic concern which generally results in indifference. To me I can be sympathetically concerned about immigrant laborers exploited by unscrupulous management, but I find little I can do about befriending or working with these laborers. And though some animal lovers may disagree, I can have sympathy for birds unable to enter a secure pasture, or an opossum trying to cross the street, but I cannot see myself being true friends with such animals. If you "pity" or "have sympathy" for people with disabilities you will never work with a person with a disability as an equal and you will never be a true friend to a person whit a disability. I believe that Disability status is not unfortunate nor is it a necessary evil. Having a disability is a way God chose to create some human beings and it is no more tragic or unfortunate than being born any particular race, ethnicity, or having any hair color. Only when you believe in Disability as an equal station in life assigned by the Creator as part of His sovereign plan can you truly love your neighbor as yourself and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. A secular government, media, and a general public largely interested in following their lead, have given us the disastrous treatment seen in fund raising, "poster children" and proactive medical research. Nowhere is the issue of Disability "rehabilitation" more distorted than in the way medical research attempts to find "cures." While the Deaf have become a politically mobilized and large force about the issue, Deaf people are rarely depicted as leaders of the Deaf community. Among other reasons, that is partly because they oppose much of the medical research alleged to "help cure" deafness like cochlear implants. The treatment has been compared to a companion for lip reading and is said to be a "cure" for as many as seventy-five percent of our nation’s citizens who are Deaf, though it is now used by less than twenty percent. They were overwhelmingly rejected as an option by most of the Americans who are born Deaf. Furthermore cochlear implants have been criticized as undesirable by Deaf leaders who do not wish to reverse their condition, including Dr. I. King Jordan, Rosalyn Rosen, Jackie Roth, and Gary Malkowski. Among the most successful living Deaf people, only Henry Kisor has expressed a desire to use them so he may become hearing. What the hearing majority needs to do, rather than pushing their views on the deaf, is to accept that some people happen not to hear, and that is their heritage; they are equal to all others and should be respected and treated as equals, not with sympathy but with the same opportunity as those who happen to hear. There are three reasons why people who truly care about human rights should oppose cochlear implants: their overall ineffectiveness, their tendency to cut users off from both Deaf and hearing persons, and their reinforcing of the stereotype that Deaf people are inferior and only with hearing can they be truly like everyone else. Gary Malkowski, a Canadian legislator who battled his way to a seat in Ontario's parliament making him the only deaf person in recorded history to hold an elective government office, took this opinion to a new extreme. He opposed surgery to make Deaf persons hear, saying that when hearing parents approached him saying they respect his view about deafness being akin to heritage, but they want their children to hear like they do, they did not get the benevolent reception they expected. Instead Mankowski told them, "I presume then that you have no objection to me giving my children surgery to make them deaf." Most people who are Deaf do not wish to hear any more than most black people would prefer to be white or women prefer to be men. Another sad instance of pity or at best separate but equal status has been special education. As a student who received some of his primary education in special ed., I contend that it is most often a mistake to label a student "learning disabled" and then expect him to learn by segregating him away from the overwhelming majority of his peers. I would encourage resource classes that are used for part but not all of the school day as an enhancement to mainstreaming the child and teaching him or her to learn with "regular" students. While I do not think that all students should be taught in regular classes, I am completely opposed to imposing special ed. without the endorsement of the parents and whenever possible the student. One reason the institution is out of control is because it is used disproportionately, in different states. States like Idaho and Hawaii have very few people in special ed., while states like Connecticut and Massachusetts have many more largely related to the popularity of the special ed. concept in those states. Another is that it is often enforced on students who have disabilities that do not affect the ability to learn. While many school districts stick students in special ed. for things like blindness, hearing impairments, cerebral palsy, diabetes, and even speech disorders, the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of these children can perform as well or better than their average peers and need to be learning in regular classes where they can be taught English, math, science, history, and the other philosophical disciplines without being discriminated against for their disabilities. That notwithstanding, a good many people who received some or all of their education in special ed. have gone on to become world famous including President Woodrow Wilson, Louis Braille, Stevie Wonder, Whoopi Goldberg, Bruce Jenner, Christopher Burke, Greg Louganis, Gabe Kaplan, Heather Whitestone McCallum, and Olympian Andy Leonard. Some of these people did not learn to read until they reached adulthood. Some immortal achievers like Thomas Edison were unable to fit in with other students or learn from most teachers in school. Millions more people with various learning disabilities have succeeded in careers as teachers, journalists, business people, engineers, and other professions without ever having their names known. Sadly many others are told they cannot achieve much and so they listen and allow that prophesy to be fulfilled. Like with most issues, the media has weighed in heavily and affected the treatment of the Disabled more than any other institution. The views that get the most media coverage are those that mock and laugh at the Disabled, those that try to seek funds for the Disabled, and those that proactively seek medical research to "cure" the Disabled. While the first of these three has been done less throughout my adult lifetime, do not think it has become passe. A Chicago bus ad written in the mid 1990s bragged that Chicago buses "get more checkups than a hypochondriac." There is nothing else you can call this but exploitation by advertisers to make a joke at the expense of innocent people suffering from a condition over which they have no control. To this day it is quite common for movies, television, and advertisements to joke about "going crazy", "losing your head", "having half a brain", and even being "schizophrenic." An ad for Nick-at-Nite on Nickelodeon said of the character Chrissy on Three's Company "in reality a person with her I.Q. would need twenty-four hour supervision.” Now, I know many people with IQ far lower than that character's who are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, but the writers simply wanted to make a funny ad and didn't give a rat's rear end that they were highly insulting four and a half million North Americans with mental disabilities and another ten and a half million with IQ in the seventies and eighties who make up the bottom five percent of intelligence, not to mention their families and friends! Former Vice-President Al Gore took the cake for insults on the Disabled referring to his political opponents as having an "extra chromosome." Such comments show hatred toward the Disabled. The other attempts are less hostile but no more beneficial in the long run. The appraising includes suite programs as the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) which since 1950 has raised money for people with the disease. Since, unlike most disabilities, it is a disease that often results in death, I find nothing wrong with trying to cure it. But the approach of depicting people with the disease as feeble, unemployable, and needy is outdated no matter how much help it has raised in the decades of the Twentieth Century. While former Utah assistant Attorney General J. Stephen Makita endorsed MDA, others with the disease including the late Evan Kemp, Jr. who was on the committee that formed ADA and later became chairman of the EEOC, denounced MDA as having done them a disservice. That is because they see these depictions as exploiting people with disabilities as "supercrips" or "Tiny Tims." While I would not insult the good-hearted people with disabilities who pose for such messages, and more often than not can see the side of their fund raisers, the opposition is also valid because you do not see groups that seek to raise scholarship money for Blacks or Jews depicting those groups as perpetually suffering. Medical research that seeks to treat people with disabilities by looking for cures so that future generations are not so "plagued" is done in spite of the fact that the overwhelming majority of people with disabilities and their families have accepted their conditions and have no interest in living without their disabilities. A century ago Helen Keller said she had no desire to see because she would rather walk with a friend in darkness than alone in the light (but she did express a desire to hear to be better connected to people). You can ask evangelist David Ring, actor Christopher Burke of Life Goes On, columnist Marta Russell, or evangelist and Gospel singer Jim Hukill what they may want different, and I guarantee you they will not say living without a Disability. Senator and Presidential candidate Bob Dole made it to the leadership of the Republican Party with one unusable arm and amputee Daniel K. Inouye has been elected to the U.S. Senate seven times. Their work for the Disabled, as that of former Democratic House whip Tony Cochlea, who chaired the President's committee on the Disabled, shows that people can make it to the top not in spite of their disabilities but often with those disabilities as part of the beauty of their achievement. While the media's treatment of the Disabled is still shameful, thankfully the law has caught up to us in giving equal rights to the Disabled. While these laws are not always enforced, they are in the process of being realities, and no group of oppressed persons is ever liberated all at once. As young people grow up with the equality of the Disabled, we can hope that like women, Blacks, and other minorities they will successfully integrate into the mainstream within a generation, and by the time the children born in the first decade of the Twenty-First Century attend college, seeing Disabled in leadership potions in schools, government agencies, professions, and business is the norm, not the exception. And as usual I give credit where it is due and say it was the Republicans who made Disabled rights a reality. Ronald Reagan, a firm believer in justice and equal treatment for all human beings, appointed a thirteen person committee, all conservative Republicans with disabilities, who drafted the disability rights law that became the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed into law by President George Herbert Walker Bush in 1990. In fairness, most liberals and conservatives were on board with the action by then, and heroes of the ADA include Tony Coehleo, Judy Hueman, Norman Lear, James Brady, Orrin Hatch, Amar Gill, Sargent Shriver, and Robert Kennedy's widow, David Beem, Jesse Jackson, Jason Kingsley, Wynona Ryder, Winston Groom, Senator Lowell Weicker, Senator Max Cleland, Gerald Ford, Joseph Shapiro, Timothy Cook, and to go back farther into history, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Frank Capra, Jill Kinmont, and Theodore Roosevelt, a group as diverse as they come.
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