Liesl

Member since: 10/3/2007

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We are the world

4/29/2008 at 01:46 AM

Go. Read. Now. CrookedTimber.org

"And I have to admit that I’ve been mightily vexed by this phenomenon in recent years. Not by Hillary Clinton herself, mind you – by the phenomenon of the avoidance of disability qua disability. It’s as if we Americans have been talking about disability all our lives, as Molière’s M. Jourdain has been speaking in prose, without realizing it. Remember that debate about SCHIP? You know, the one we lost on Bush’s veto? What the hell was that about?It was about disability, folks – about children suffering catastrophic illnesses and traumatic injuries for which their parents couldn’t (and their parents’ dastardly, moustache-twirling health-insurance providers wouldn’t) provide. Vets returning from Iraq with PTSD or TBI (post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury) and being warehoused and/or underserved and/or neglected by VA hospitals? Uh, well, once again, here we’re talking about disability. Why in the world do we frame these things as matters of “health” or “employment” or “veterans’ benefits,” when doing so prevents us from realizing that we’re all touching different appendages of the 8000-pound elephant in the room? The subject is disability, people. It’s about our common frailty and vulnerability. Get used to it."
Michael Bérubé

This is an issue I've been wondering a great deal about lately. Why is it people think that because they are able bodied they do not have anything to do with disability or the issues surrounding disability? Are we/you truly that short sighted? I admit that I didn't think about disability all that much before I was forced to by disability, but I never assumed it would never be a part of myself. Honestly, it's unbelievable to me that anyone would think themselves that impervious to the degeneration all biological beings are subject to. Not just degeneration, but the accidental nature of life itself.

People! I have news for you!

You are going to die.

You are going to die quickly or slowly or anywhere in between and on the way there you will have pain. You will get sick, some more than others, and you will curse your immortality. These things are endemic to the nature of biology; there is no get out of humanity free card. You will not be passing stop.

You are going to deal with disability.

You will have to face the limits of your humanity, your biology and your patience when you are forced to deal with disability. You will need help and you will want to remain the choreographer of your own life. You will hate that you cannot do all that you want to do and you will curse your limitations. You will learn that life is not carefree and spontaneity no longer exists. You will learn to parcel out your time in terms of your limitations and the limitations of those around you and you will learn that being cared for or caring for someone else is the most empowering, belittling, aggressive, loving, and embarrassing thing you will ever have to face. You will lose your shame. You will lose your idea of sovereignty. You will lose your idea of yourself. You may not be the disabled person, but you will experience all of these things nevertheless.

How you deal with death, disease and disability is up to you. How you are allowed to deal with life after disability is up to all of us. If you choose not to acknowledge that there is merit in allowing people who cannot do things in the same way as everyone else or those who are unable to care for themselves to have access to health care, public spaces, employment, then you are denying your mortality as fervently as if you believed you had found the philosopher's stone. If you choose to let others wallow in the muck of society rather than acknowledging that we are not to blame for our humanness, then you are choosing a society based on your needs, your wants, your desires above all else. You are not a workable society; individualism does not endorse or include society or inhere itself beyond the limits of what we are. Individuality is. however, necessary for the understanding of self and the understanding that self inheres itself to existence. Individuality forces us to recognize that we are humans, we are other, and we are not the entirety of existence through its nature of separation. In other words, humanity gives us the ability, individualism gives us the context.

If society prevents us from obtaining the necessities of life it is degrading our rights as surely as if it imprisons us without cause; being forcibly held against your will and prevented from the freedom inherent in individualism has the same outcome as being unable to access what is needed to be human. Both things force individualism to subvert itself to the desires of others, therefore denying both our humanity and our right to be other than. If the outcome is the same but the path to that outcome is only slightly divergent, either thing is the equal of the other. Will it matter if you are in jail or if you are unable to leave your home (if you have one) when you are disabled? Will you be equal to all others in society if you are unable to acknowledge your individuality or the individuality of others through the basic assertion of your rights as a part of humanity?

Society cannot function if equality and the rights of individuals are applied sporadically. A society that lacks cohesion is inadequate to the point of exclusion. There is no way a collection of people who refuse to recognize the rights and basic access to what it required for life can progress and call itself a true society; those people exclude themselves from what society fundamentally is by their lack of a commonality of interest. Why else would people form a society if not to share commonality, to share burden and to share necessity? If we do not do these things equally then we do not care for what is outside of ourselves; we do not recognize the necessity of context, of fallibility and of biology. We cannot exist alone. It is beyond the realm of the possible; to deny that shared biological necessity is manifest by denying the care of others is to deny that we are human and to deny that we exist as individuals who possess otherness.

Io define ourselves as we Are rather than as we wish we were is the only way to understand our places in society, in life, and in time. Time is the enemy in all things; it is the enemy when those of us who reached disability first are forced to wait for everyone else to catch up before we are recognized as equal, valid human beings. It is the enemy when it robs us of the lives we thought we would have or the people we thought would always be here. You cannot fight time and win. Degradation is no less a part of biology than life is, the two being necessary for the other's existence. If you do not recognize that precarious and solid relationship you are living on the edge of sanity. Without one, there is no other; without death, life ceases to be. Without progress forward, degradation cannot exist. Without the recognition of our limits, we cease to recognize our humanity. In refusing to recognize the intrinsic nature of limitation, of age in time, you are guaranteeing your own quick slide into the intellectual degradation that comes with the inability to accept what Is. If you cannot accept the most basic tenets of life, or accept that they apply to you because you are human, you are doomed to live as if you were fighting against life itself. Without the context of reality and of place we lose our ability to exist in a meaningful way, to leave a legacy. Who are the people on the fringes? those are the people who are forgotten. Who are the people who choose that life? those are the people who cannot accept their contextual obligations to otherness. Those are the people who live as if they are alone, as if they are all that matters.

If you continue to live as if what matters to you now is what matters for you in the future, you will be doomed to a life dreams. You are refusing to recognize change, otherness and the forward movement humanity requires. Your interests will tie you to the future as surely as anything else, but those interests will change; if you are tied to the past, if you are emotionally or intellectually tied to what was once considered important because you did not consider what would be important, what will you do? How will you live if you have chosen to be pulled backward into the future rather than facing it with a confident stride? You will be one of those people we see who are trying to hold on to what they believe they once were; the people who have an idea of what they are based on an idea of what they used to be. Funny thing about ideas: they are never graspable, never holdable, never static. In trying to live up to an idea of what you are or were rather than living as you are you will fail as a human being just as surely as if you had purposely murdered your life. There is no purpose in that sort of failure; in seeking to dream and hope and not do you are seeking to deny the life that is purposefully and wholly your own. You are being held prisoner by an idea based on something that no longer exists, something that was. We pity those people for their sad, sad existences of nothingness. It is time you realize:

You will need health care.

You will need the ADA.

You will need recognition.

You will need kindness.

But will you deserve it?

Picture credit

Comments

On Apr 29, 2008 Tim said:

wow, this is one of my favorite posts ever. powerful, poignant, true.
On Apr 29, 2008 timpoindexter said:

Since I don't have a brilliant epiphony of my own to share with you today I thought I'd give
On Apr 29, 2008 Liesl said:

Thank you! I just reread and noticed typos and some places that need some work. I'm glad you liked it, that means a great deal to me.

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Liesl

We are the world

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