Month: April 2007

Join us won’t you?  Steve is contributing a post to this "event" being hosted for a second year at Diary of a Goldfish, along with many other strong voices.  Yours included if you’re so inclined.  Blue says:

"Everyone is welcome to join in with Blogging Against Disablism day,
disabled and non-disabled, as long as you wish to blog against the
discrimination that disabled people experience."

"On Tuesday, May 1st – or as near to as you are able – post something on
the subject of Disabilism, Ableism or Disability Discrimination (see Language Amnesty).
You can write on any subject, specific or general, personal, social or
political, anything which states an objection to the differential
treatment of disabled people."

For more info: Blogging Against Disablism Day

Because this is still disability awareness month I want to call attention to the recent antics of Stephen Hawking who is arguably one of earth’s most noteworthy scientists and who is additionally and famously a person who has ALS or "Lou Gehrig’s Disease".  Professor Hawking recently took an airplane flight that was designed to produce entire moments of weightlessness.

You can read about Hawking’s gravity free flight at the BBC’s website here.  A video can be seen at this MSNBC site.
 

I have never met Stephen Hawking and need to say that my understanding of him has been influenced by an account of him in John Hockenberry’s memoir "Moving Violations".  Hockenberry recounts his efforts to speak with Hawking when he was speaking at a university someplace.  As the story goes, Hawking and his handlers had no time to talk with a disabled person.

Surely one incident of insensitive and overzealous time management doesn’t tell the whole story of a man’s life.

But Stephen Hawking is generally regarded as not being interested in people with disabilities.  And now we know he’s also not really a believer in life on earth.

Hawking reminds me of the stock character who turns up now and again on Star Trek; he’s the bodiless brain that flies the space craft all alone and is simultaneously misanthropic.  He’s Captain Ahab without a crew.  He thinks that people smell and what’s worse, they get the pages of magazines all sticky with their greasy little fingers.  (Ahab hated it when his crew members borrowed his magazines.)

Hawking believes that life on earth is doomed and that we must go into space colonization as quickly as possible.

The problem is that life, no matter where it is lived, is always doomed.  Life is life.  And then, suddenly, life isn’t life anymore.

Let’s stake our claim here on the green planet.  Let’s assure that the progressive uses of technology will improve what we are now calling "universal design".  Let’s live without fear.

I remain a swords into ploughshares kind of guy and I can then envision ploughshares as the worldwide accommodation of physical differences.

Besides, I don’t need to unplug my brain from my body in order to sail out into space.  I can read the poetry of Nanao Sakaki and Mr. Whitman and jeez, that costs nothing if I return my library books on time.

S.K. 

I have always been "outside the box" because, well, blindness puts a person in the wrong location more often than not.  I’ve walked into the Women’s Room at airports; the broom closet; and once, famously, I walked into the morgue at the University of Iowa’s hospital when I was looking for out patient services.

I used to fret about being so inordinately messed up.  I used to think that I should really be like everyone else.  Then, slowly, almost so slowly one could call it geological, like the erosion of a coastal shelf, I began to understand that I would never occupy public space like sighted people.

In short I had a realization: I’m not a blind person who is trying to be a sighted person.  I’m a blind person.  That’s a big difference.  You could say that it’s like the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.  I am a blind person who roams about the world and the whims of architects and the painted lines don’t mean a thing to me.  There’s nothing I can do about this fact.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I don’t plan to enter the Ladies Room at the Madison, Wisconsin Municipal Airport.  I just wind up walking in because I’ve already asked two passersby if the rest rooms are nearby and both have said ever so helpfully that "it’s over there" and presumably they pointed in the manner of all sighted people who persist in this gambit even though they are talking to a blind person with a dog.

So I take the sighted people literally and head "over there" and wind up in the female rest room and I can assure you that there’s usually a gasp or a cry of odd delight.  Who after all but a blind man can enter that zone without the corresponding and lurid subtexts of a suspicious society.  And let’s face it.  When women see the beautiful guide dog, well it’s all over.  I confess that I could probably have been married more than once given that peculiar avenue of the lost and my place upon it.

But I digress.  I am always lost and I spend tons of time talking to strangers.  That’s another way in American culture to be "out of the box" since no one talks to anyone else in the USA if they can help it.  I stand on street corners in various cities and talk at top volume to people I can’t see and I say things like: "Is this Lexington Avenue?"  And lo and behold people respond with the correct answer.  And they always seem a little astonished that they have indeed found their respective voices.  In this way I help odd people who I do not know find their individual ways out of their respective and private boxes.

Sometimes I think I should just rent myself out.  I’m a walking version of street theater.  Like all people with disabilities…

S. K.