I am I, you are you

Yesterday, the H.R. 3195: Amendments Act of 2008 passed the House, 402 to 17. I will list the nay votes at the bottom, but just be glad Ron Paul didn’t get anywhere with his campaign. Ron Paul is a doctor and should know better.

Speaking of knowing better, there is a new story about an autistic child and his parent being kicked off of a plane before the plane left the ground. (HT to Deafmom) I don’t know what really happened so I won’t comment on which side was right or even if there is a clearly right side. What I can comment on is a blog post I read (again, HT to Deafmom) that called for people with special needs children to either sedate them or stay home. If you’ve ever been forced to withstand the screaming of a child while on an airplane where you cannot escape, you know how horrible it is and how painful it can become for everyone on the plane. No one would dispute that or dispute the fact that children should be able to follow aviation rules when flying, or that their parents should enforce those rules. All of that is obvious and hardly needs to be mentioned by logic loving people. However, the thing that disturbs me about the opinions expressed in that blog post is that disability is something that is not normal. She states: “There’s lots more I can say on the whole overuse of special needs syndrome that’s making life so annoying for normal people - but that’s for another day.”

Pick your jaw up off of the floor and let’s get down to business. Where are people getting this idea that there is such a thing as “normal” that applies to more than one person? My idea of normal, disability or no disability, is absolutely different from everyone else’s idea of normal. Even my husband has a different idea of normal, and we live in the same house and share everything. I think people who are illogical and refuse to listen to what other people have to say are abnormal; I think that because they are outside of the idea and reality of normal I choose and am forced to accept. Yet, there are people, probably even people I know or knew, who think that the strict adherence to reason is abnormal in its denial of emotion 99% of the time. The point is, there is no possible way to describe or agree upon an idea of normal that applies to any hint of plurality. It is not normal for me to think of people with disabilities as something that should be shameful, though it is clearly normal for the blogger previously mentioned to think so. Which one of us is normal?

The problem is easily elucidated when you think of the phrase, “We’re just like everyone else; we just do things in a different way.” I may have used that phrase or something similar to it in this blog. It’s an inherently fallacious statement because it assumes that there are people out there who are not different. Yet, we are defined by our limits and those limits are enforced by the fact that there is otherness, there is individuality, there is me and there is you. I am not the same as anyone else on the planet because I am different; dare I say it? I am unique… just like everyone else. The fact is, our only normal state is in the very difference that inheres itself to humanity. We all fit into the category of human being, and we all fit into the category of singularity.* Those hyper categories are the things that bind us together, but they are also the things that show us that our differences are our only sameness; normal literally translates to, creates and destroys difference.

I wonder why that blogger has the idea that she is normal and someone with “special needs” is not normal. I have to wonder how many times in her life she has been represented completely by other people, or how often she sees her own thinking manifest in others. We may see glimpses of that sort of thing here and there, but to find someone who is exactly like you would be impossible, even if we were able to discover it. I can no more tell what you are thinking than you can tell what I am thinking,** which makes the measurement of sameness unthinkable. When we believe we’ve met someone who is just like us, we are often more disappointed by them than by people we recognize as “not our kind;” this stems from the betrayal of self that we feel when the person reveals that they are not, in fact, like us, or as like us as we imagined. Those are the times when our difference is known to us and when we realize that we will never be anything but alone in our individuality. I wouldn’t even say that identical twins*** have anything other than their duality, though they share the same genes. Even twins develop as people in different ways, which allows for the fact that we are a priori beings with a posteriori lives. Regardless of your belief in biology over personality or a soul over nothingness or anything in between, you must admit that there are many things in this life that we are forced to accept and that anything that forces acceptance is a limitation. We are the products of our limited experiences and physical nature and those two things force our normalcy to be what it is, regardless of our willing it otherwise. Yet, this normal thing is only an illusion and must ever be thus.

Normal is an illusion because normal does not and cannot exist. As I stated in an earlier post, normal can never be static due to the fallibility and constant forward motion inherent in biological life. Unless a thing is something that exists unchanging, it cannot be said to exist at all. While people die, the energy that made up the person does not die, nor does it degrade. It exists without change, though it manifests itself in particular ways. The appearance of change is there, but the actuality is not. Is a dog ever anything but a dog? Is energy ever anything but energy? Are you ever anything but you? The thing itself that is a human being will remain (evolution is another topic and one we do not need to go into at this juncture); “normal” doesn’t exist for the thing itself because that would allow for variation, and the thing itself cannot admit for variation. If there is something that is normal, there must also be something that abnormal. This is true for Humanity; is there Not Humanity? Of course not. Normal cannot have an a priori existence. What we are finally left with is the idea we attach to the word “normal” without anything that points to its actuality. Normal is as normal does, and normal does not do at all.

Where does this idea of normal come from, then? It turns out that our idea of normal is nothing more than a statistic; if you are a part of a group and everyone in that group has blond hair, you are a part of that group. If you are a part of a group and everyone but you has blond hair, you exist in that group as the way that shows the statistical nature of the group. It is nothing more than a simple majority! The “normal” blogger who inspired me to write this post was repulsive in her bold acceptance of her superiority in her perceived normalness. The endorsement of some sort of special class of people who are entitled to more simply because they are part of a majority is an idea that continues to do a great deal of damage to humanity. Eugenics was founded on that principle and it is the idea that motivates anyone who would take away the rights of others. What is ironic is that the blogger is trying to claim that people who have “special needs” are asking for special accommodation, above and beyond what “normal” people have. Yet, her idea of her own superiority is one of claiming special rights for herself and others like her when people who are different “annoy” her. She is seeking special accommodation for her group from other groups and is doing it in the mode of seeking to deny special accommodation to other groups. She is asking for something that she claims to abhor and requiring other people to act in a way that recognizes her rights and the rights of people like her above others! She is asking other people to accept her majority as a thing in itself, a thing that exists no matter what. I find that so… puzzling. I suppose I shouldn’t expect a great deal of logic from a woman who claims that because her kids have asthma she could request a special accommodation for them to breathe. The right to breathe requires special accommodation?

I’m going to take my abnormal body to bed and sleep to nurture my normal existence. Sleep as a requirement for human life is static, though my mind never is and never will be. What I wouldn’t give for the mindless comfort of the majority when I am trying to sleep!

*Even conjoined twins are singular and have singular ideas.

**As it turns out, people can tell what I am thinking: Yesterday, my students told me that they can tell when I get frustrated in class because my face turns bright red. I had no idea!

***The semester before last I had two sets of twins in one class. This semester I have four people in one class who have a twin. What are the odds?

Nay votes:

GA: Broun, Paul [R]
CA: Campbell, John [R]
CA: Doolittle, John [R]
TN: Duncan, John [R]
AZ: Flake, Jeff [R]
NJ: Garrett, E. [R]
TX: Gohmert, Louis [R]
TX: Hensarling, Jeb [R]
GA: Kingston, Jack [R]
GA: Linder, John [R]
TX: Marchant, Kenny [R]
TX: Paul, Ronald [R]
TX: Poe, Ted [R]
GA: Price, Tom [R]
CO: Tancredo, Thomas [R]
FL: Weldon, David [R]
GA: Westmoreland, Lynn [R]