Disaboom recently commissioned a survey of able bodied people to get
their ideas on what life would be like if they were to suddenly become
disabled. The results of the poll were very hurtful and disheartening
when I first read them, but the more I've thought about it, the more I
think they are as they should be. 52% of able bodied people polled
responded that they would rather die than live with a disability. I get
that.
Getting
that might not have been the reaction you would expect from a disabled
woman who leads a rich, rewarding life with a disability. I get that,
too. I've stated many times since I got sick that I would not want to
live in a locked in state, nor would I want to live if my brain
registered as dead. But the truth is, I don't know what I would want in
that situation. I can't possibly judge such a thing because I lack the
understanding of what that thing means. As another member put it, I
lack the imagination to project my self into that situation because it
doesn't hold any commonality with who I am today. I am what I consider
to be whole. Yet, I know that there are other people who see me as less
than because of the crutch. I don't really blame them because they,
too, lack the imagination to see themselves as a person with a crutch.
I think I would rather die than live uneducated and poor, but how would
I know I was living a life I didn't like? Clearly, I wouldn't know it.
I
think we possess the ability to make moral judgments on actions we have
not experienced because all of those judgments stem from the principle
of harm: if you violate someone else's liberty then you are violating
their basic right to a lack of harm. But there is nothing moral about
wanting to live as a person with a disability or not to live that way;
it is simply something we do. Chances are good most people would change
their minds and find heretofore unknown strength to cope with a new way
of life. That's why we say that nobody is really against the disabled.
The morality of the issue only comes into the argument when we seek to
harm someone else, to take away their liberty. No one is attempting
that when they say they'd rather die than be one of us, though.
Understandably,
many people with disabilities took this news of the 52% pretty hard.
Many took it personally and some took it as a rallying call against
able bodied people. I've seen a fair bit of that sort of thing in the
disability community, an us versus them attitude, and I think it does
us more harm than it does them. We are the ones called upon to force
the issue of acceptance, not the people who can't even imagine what our
lives are and how we live them. It is our responsibility as people with
disabilities to make other people aware of the challenges we face, the
limitations they unwittingly put on us. Would you know to help someone
if they never made it known themselves? Of course not. That is canoe
we're paddling and the one we continually have to attempt to point in
the same direction.
It's not that we need able bodied people to
understand us intimately. What we need is for people to understand that
we know only what we know and to make a judgment based on what someone
else knows is beyond our powers of imagination. We've all been hurt, so
we know that hurting someone else is not right or good. I don't have to
be raped to know that it would hurt like hell and would cause all kinds
of anguish, just as someone who is able bodied doesn't need to know
that it is wrong to dump someone out of their wheelchair. There is a
basic principle of harm in those two actions that we can all
understand. What we need to let people slide on is this idea that they
have to understand the basic facts of our existence and our limitations
without having anything in their own lives to understand them with;
they lack the necessary tools of experience. It is for that reason that
I think the moral indignation against able bodied people is misplaced.
It is unfair to ask people to put themselves in our shoes, wheels or
prosthetics and to instantly understand what life is like as a person
with a disability.
It's interesting to note that people who have
lived with disability their entire lives tend to have a slightly
different take on these things than those of us who became disabled
later. I think the life long disability might make you more tolerant of
the other side because they have no idea what it is like not to be able
bodied, just as you have no idea what it's like to be able bodied. It's
those of us who came by our disabilities later in life that tend to
have a harder time with the attitudes we think we see in the able
bodied community. Really, it shouldn't be that way; I remember the fact
that disability was simply not present in my life and therefore lacked
meaning to me. That doesn't mean I would park in the handicapped spots
or act in ways that were harmful to people with disabilities, but I
know that imagining my life now would have been impossible. Actually,
if you could go back and tell that version of me running up that
mountain in Los Angeles that in a few short years I'd be walking with a
crutch and parking in the handicapped spot I probably would have been
immeasurably depressed. I would have lacked the process necessary to
grieve the loss of my current idea of normalcy. And there is nothing
wrong with that, just as there is nothing wrong with thinking you'd
rather die than live with disability.
I know I am not heroic in
any way, just as everyone else who is disabled is not heroic due solely
to their disability. I might be heroic in the influence I have over my
students and the good I do, but the disability is only that basic
existence that lacks moral value. That's it, isn't it? There is nothing
morally valuable about being disabled or able bodied, it simply is our
existence. When we start to put value on either one of those things, we
lose our ability to accept life as it is and we begin to think that our
existence is contingent upon our ability to walk or wash ourselves.
Those things are the same for all people; we simply must do what we
must do and any heroism we find in our lives must surpass those must
dos. As I stated in an earlier post, heroism is the bounding beyond
normal. Imagination and heroism are fine things, but they are always
based on our own reality. And you know what? There's nothing wrong with
that.
Picture credit
