Sorry I haven’t updated this site since Thursday. on Friday, I was busy, then I was home for the weekend where my pc isn’t set up. Blogging is my addiction (well, one of three or four, actually) and I stat feeling guilty if I can’t do it every day or so. I’m not sure why, but it’s not dissimilar to my compulsion to show off.
Anyway, while I was at home, I found that the most recent issue of Speak Out had been delivered. This is the one voice magazine. This edition carried news of mine and Katie’s graduation successes, as well as a report of the gospel choir donation, which, if I bump into them, I’ll show Dom and the head of music. It gave me great pride in reading of everyone’s successes.
There was,, however, one thing which I’m not entirely sure about. Far be it for me to begrudge a fellow cripples success – I am, after all, just a pseudo-intellectual whizzing around campus talking bollox about Lacan – but I’m not too keen on Toby’s business. He goes into schools talking about disability. From what I can gather, he gives talks and demonstrations to school children on disability and social acceptance. Now, I’m all for such things, especially about raising awareness of disability among kids. I just think A) there are better ways to achieve such things and B) that Toby’s approach may be counter productive. To me, to go into schools and say ‘look at me, I have cp’ smacks of tokenism (as dr. West-Burnham recently pointed out). It reminds me of a zoo: ‘look, I have an iguana and a cripple to show you today, kids’. It is far better to actually teach disabled kids alongside able-bodied kids: this way, the lesions will be much longer-lasting. Moreover, Toby’s approach will in fact re-enforce ideas of difference: by setting himself up as a ‘special event’, he is in Marxist language fettishising himself. I admit I had similar ideas once, but there was always this worry that I might turn myself into a three ring circus. To the kids he talks to, disability will be seen as a rarity, something uncommon to be explored. In short, freakish. I really don’t like this sort of tokenism, and fear it may be doing more harm than good.