Disability and the Mainstream Sunflowers

First off, let me tell you about my maternal grandfather who had a grade school education and managed to make millions of dollars during World War I by manufacturing munitions for the U.S. Army. He made a fortune on the bad luck of others and at the height of his new found wealth (1917) he invested all his money in the Russian Czarist government. Thereafter my grandfather spent most of his time in the woods of New Hampshire blowing up barns with dynamite, but not as a vocation–dynamite became his hobby and the sole reason for getting out of bed. You can think of my grandfather as a perverse variant of Mozart’s Papageno–he sang to himself in the forest but instead of a bird cage and net he had TNT and blasting caps.

In the field of disability studies we talk about the “defective people industry” –a term that designates organizations both public and private that raise money on behalf of “the disabled” (perhaps for cures but sometimes for social services) and always implicit in the philanthropic pitch is the idea that people with disabilities are a different class of our citizenry. Another way to say this is that people with disabilities are thought of as being irrevocably outside of our cities and towns, our workplaces and universities…

Though its crude to reduce large social forces to simple maxims its possible to say that the defective people industry or DPI has a long standing investment in the idea that disability should be outside the city’s walls. For if PWDs are effectively part of the municipal and social activities of our society then the image of the lost disabled person who needs our cradle to grave support would vanish.

Imagine every corner gas station has a wheelchair repair service. Imagine wheelchair users doing the work…

Picture blind people inside that gas station, selling the gasoline…

Deaf people as television anchor men and women…professors…

As our nation ages and our sophistication about bodily differences continues to grow we will have to effect these transformations.

My university currently has its student disability services in the basement of a dormitory. It should be in the busy university owned shopping mall. They should be encouraged to sell technology and educate the broader public.

My grandfather was disabled by his lack of education. Our culture is disabled by its lingering inability to think with imagination about disability inclusion.

In a poem called “Among Sunflowers” James Wright wrote: “You can stand in among them without/being afraid.”

S.K.

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto