2007-12-26 - 4:24 p.m.
The traditional attitude about people with disabilities has been that they are the Other, a separate category to be treated as �special� (and a group you should be glad you�re not in). Perhaps they are not even fully human, or at least less than full citizens like those without disabilities. This separateness and pity still informs some public policy. But it is my impression that at least in society as a whole it is fading away.
It was noted by a teacher of mine that there is an essential contradiction in the official American approach to disability. Social Security (and by extension any policy dating from earlier times) is grounded in pity and says people with disabilities are incapable and to be cared for (perhaps this is a burdensome task). The Americans with Disabilities Act (and other more modern policy) says people with disabilities are just people.
Younger people � those born after (or at least very young during) the passage of the 1990 ADA � seem to view people with disabilities as simply a part of the community. The younger generation seems much more accepting of people with disabilities in their world. Personally, I have recently had interactions with children and younger people that I would never have had with adults.
There was of course what my 21-year old former personal attendant said about everyone needing help at some point and how that starkly differed from the attitude of an older attendant. And I�ve recently had unexpected casual conversations on the bus with little kids (one of whom asked me if I was familiar with the very neighborhood I lived in � perhaps he�s thinking of moving here�).
Back in the fall, I went past a school around the corner from my house. A minute later a girl from there, about 12 years old, raced up to me and demanded I sing �Soldier Boy�. (I would guess she had a bet with her friends about whether older people would sing the contemporary hip-hop song or the 1962 Shirelles number. I chose the hip-hop tune and according to her I �passed�.)
A few weeks later, two girls about seven years old accosted me on the street outside my apartment building and sold me homemade Halloween cards �to benefit our school�. Simple exchanges, really (although such random encounters are exactly what �community interaction� means). But the fact that a person in a wheelchair took part in them seems evidence of change in the social view of disability among children.
Adults on the street generally do not treat me as just a regular Joe but as someone �special�, certainly not to be casually interacted with and possibly even to be avoided. (Indeed, I wonder how much of this thinking I myself internalized as a youth without a disability.) Others are often surprised when I initiate a conversation (even just ordering a latte) and speak normally. Oh yeah, they seem to be reminded. He�s just some guy like me.
Of course, a handful of interactions provide only anecdotal evidence and do not definitively indicate an emerging shift in consciousness. They do not authoritatively prove anything. Maybe all of this is just wishful thinking. But my fervent hope is that a more scientifically rigorous investigation into generational attitudes towards disability will bear out these suspicions.
Nya laughed when I came home and told her about buying the Halloween cards. She said there probably was no school for which the kids were raising money and I had just been roped in to shelling out by the girls� cuteness. Maybe I had. But it occurs to me that I was not targeted because I was in a wheelchair. If the little girls were indeed scamming, they were equal-opportunity scammers.
� 2007 Geoff Gladstone
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