30 Days in a chair

The wonderful show 30 Days is back. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, it is produced, written and narrated by Morgan Spurlock, the documentary filmmaker who made Super Size Me. Last week's episode showed Spurlock working in a coal mine for 30 days and living with a coal mining family. I had no idea we were raping the Appalachians that drastically. Good god, it was enough to make one despair for our planet more than we ever thought we could. The premise of the show is to show a person what it is like to live as someone else. Last season there was a particularly poignant show about immigration; a man who voluntarily patrols the borders went to live with a family of illegal immigrants in Los Angeles. He came to understand their struggle far more but he didn't end up changing his mind. That made me sad, but I was glad to have had the opportunity to see the experiment and to gain a far subtler understanding of both sides of that issue. Edited to add: here it is on Hulu.com

Last night, 30 Days focused on disability, specifically spinal chord injuries and paralysis. Ray Crockett, a former NFL cornerback with two super bowl wins lived for 30 days in a wheelchair. Needless to say, I was thrilled to see that they were not only doing this episode, but that they chose someone many people would consider a paragon of strength and ability. The changes Crockett went through by the end of the show seemed genuine and he seemed to have a real understanding of what it is like to live as someone who is considered less than. While the show showed other wheelers and the struggles and strengths they endured and possessed it never focused on the maudlin, the down trodden, or the sympathetic crip angle. Those angles would have been easy to portray as they are the way most people see us. People with disabilities will often tell you that able bodied people tend to fall into one of two categories when they encounter PWD: they ignore us or they praise us for our heroic strength and courage. Most of us don't like either reaction. People might think that's wrong, especially in connection to the abundance of praise heaped on us when we are disabled (particularly people who were not born with their disability), but we usually see it as something that separates us from normal life and something that gives disability more credit than it is due. I'm not brave or heroic for soldiering on through disability, I am just me. Is it brave to simply go on with life? Of course not. The assumption that there is heroism or bravery involved sets us apart; rather than dealing with us as people, it deals with us as disabled. That is the misconception we are trying to fight.

Getting back to the show: I was pleased that the show was filmed in Dallas, too. If you watch the show (I'm sure it will be repeated) you can even see the hallways where I got to bang into walls while doing my stroke rehab. The hallways Crockett travels in the rehab center at Baylor are the hallways my therapist used to guide me as I tried to walk, or walk in a straight line, or gently push me against the walls to try and find my balance. Let's just say that I left my mark(s) all over those halls. Seeing Crockett in the rehab center and then around Dallas was oddly empowering. For a brief moment we were able to claim him as our own and it felt good to see someone on TV talking about the issues we face. Obviously, the issues a wheeler faces are different from the issues I face, but we also share many common themes, frustrations, and barriers. We have very little representation in the media and seeing something that was mainstream and focused particularly and intimately on us was new and exciting. This might be hard for ABs to understand, but think of it this way: when I hear my name spoken on TV or in movies it is always an unusual experience; how many people do you know named Liesl? I'm simply not used to it and hearing it makes me feel kind of funny, but it also makes me feel included, part of the club. It is the same with disability, or race, or anything else we use to set others apart from us; when we are not represented in the ways other people are, it is an empowering experience when we do see ourselves or our issues represented inclusively. We become part of the club, we feel recognized as normal. Which, to be frank, we are.

I hope Crockett uses his experience as a PWD to inform his life. I know we are uniquely capable of forgetting hardship and pain as human beings, so I have my doubts. Nevertheless, I am proud of Crockett for answering the call and for living as a PWD. I'd call it heroic, but heroism has nothing to do with it. What Crockett did was pedagogic, to himself, to his family and to those of us who will watch the show. Learning doesn't imply heroism, just as life does not imply heroism. We need to get to the place where we realize that disability is like life in that respect: heroism only exists when it exists outside of the limitations we face. Is it heroic for a man to cross the street? No. Is it heroic for a man to cross the street to save a child while putting himself in danger? Yes. The man's limitations (his fallibility, the impending danger that could cause harm) are the things against which heroism is measured. We don't call the man heroic because he is a man; we call him heroic because he transversed normalcy. We are not heroic for living our lives; we are simply living our lives. We are heroic when we go beyond the realm of our normal lives. It might be less heroic for an AB to run across the street to save a child than it would be for someone like me; my normalcy is different from the AB man's normalcy. But that does not mean that my normalcy is any less normal. In other words, we all have different abilities, desires, motivations, and responses; the heroism isn't in the difference. The heroism is in the bounding beyond normal.

I hope everyone watches the episode. I hope you come away from it with a better understanding of why it is necessary to see people as people instead of the things that make up the person. Ray Crockett is African American. Is that who he is? is that what defines his entirety? No. It is a part of him. Just as being a football player is a part of him and being married and being a father and living in Dallas and attending Baylor University and on and on. Stop seeing us as the embodiment of our limitations; see us instead as the embodiment of our possibilities. Just as you see everyone else.

Picture credit