This is the question that St. Peter will ask me, though he might not be St. Peter–he might be a Norse God like Odin (who had one eye). The gate keeper to the after life might be nothing more than a child, one who has been granted immortality because she or he, back on earth, was killed by Teddy Roosevelt’s marines who as you may remember massacred whole families in the Philippines under the banner called “the white man’s burden”. One thing’s for sure: the gate keeper asks you what you knew. There’s no book of days. They don’t calculate your “sin to virtue” ratio. And in my case they will ask me about disabilities because not only did I have one but I fought for strangers who also had them–fought poorly, inelegantly, often in discouragement. Anyone who’s an advocate for people with disabilities knows this sense of being always in a long, roller coaster, topsy turvy, fight or flee struggle to express the rights of citizenship and inclusion. And my St. Peter who will be a little girl from the Philippines who was executed in the courtyard of a church will ask me what I knew. You see, getting into the afterlife is about thinking on your feet, just as it was down here.
So what I know about disabilities, rendered on the threshold, is that one must be able to think quickly and often when one’s own dignity or the dignity of others is at stake. “You can’t come in here with the dog,” said a door keeper at Barnes & Noble on 6th avenue in Manhattan. A lovely irony since I’d given a reading in that very store, a reading that had been filmed by NBC’s “Dateline”. “You can’t come in here.” And thinking on my feet I just went in. I let him scrabble after me like a drunken crab. I called loudly to get the manager. Shoppers gaped. It was suddenly nice and hot under the proscenium arch of that flagship bookstore. The manager of course agreed that I could be there but he was rude. I decided that his rudeness had nothing to do with me–that is, I saw that he was universally rude, that he probably had hammertoes or tight underwear. The point is, dear gate keeper, I saw that beyond my inclusion I didn’t need the approval of a suffering man. “That’s how it was down there,” I’ll say to the immortal girl or boy.
“They had poetry down there,” I’ll say. “They worked hard, those with consciences and hearts.” “We gave our lives to seeing what is far off.”
I know that we treat veterans with disabilities poorly or well, depending on where they get their medical care; that we treat the elderly with disabilities with care and concern or with disrespect depending on their wealth; that we treat children with disabilities with courtesy and with proper ambition depending on where they live. I know that there are innumerable colleges and universities in the United States that are failing to meet even the basic requirements for accessibility as outlined by the Americans with Disabilities Act. And so we are still seeing what is far off. We see that we are in a world of suffering. We do our best. We see disability as a central concern in the fight for universal human rights.
“Was that too much to ask?” I will ask.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 