You know, it’s hard not to feel cynical sometimes; its hard not to feel angry; its hard not to feel persecuted. Not that I feel such things, personally. For the most part I am happy. around campus people respect me, often bending over backwards to help me, when asked. I have a first class degree, the equipment I need to do my masters, a good set of Pas. What more could a cripple ask for.
Yet, looking at disability politics and issues as a whole, its hard not to feel bitter. I feel bitter about the special school system, as you know. But there’s other stuff too:
yesterday I read how a girl with cp in the states, prone to choking fits, was sent to school with a DNR sign attached to her chair. I mean – this is a living, thinking, communicating seven year old. And, as if that wasn’t enough, the newspaper which first published the article got back comments like ” She’s a detriment to others.”, ” A tube! I don’t want my kids to watch her eat!” and probably the worst ” If a machine has to breathe life into her lungs, Is she really worthy of this air?”
How the fucking hell can people be so cruel as to question a child’s right to air? Moreover, I was chatting to a guy in Australia earlier who grew up in institutions. He pointed out that he and other disabled people like him could draw parallels with the now famous ‘stolen generation’. In the twenties and thirties, aboriginal children were taken, often by force, from their parents and raised in ‘white’ families, often as servants. This barbarity was described as being ‘for their own good’. Similarly, in the fifties and sixties, parents of disabled children were encourage to institutionalise their kids, ‘for their own good’. Hence history repeated itself, and kids like Anne
MacDonald paid the price,
Looking across the board, at segregation, institutionalisation, murder – indeed across the whole of disability history – it’s hard not to feel hated. Not personally – I have many friends who love me, as I do them – but as a type. As a disabled man, member of the disabled community, I feel victimised. We are subject to discrimination, from the big things I outlined above, to the small things: patronising people in shops, steps into buildings, cars parked on the path so I have to go on the road to get by. I try not to feel bitter – I now enjoy more freedom than ever before, and my uni years have been the best of my life – and yet, sometimes the urge to rail against the world, and the paranoid idea that some think you have the i.q of a turd, or should have been killed at birth, gets too much.
The Ill-Informed Ramblings of a Cripple 