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.
Planet of the Blind 