Disability Rights, or Starving the Monster

Thinking About Some Lines By Robert Bly

 

“A man I knew could never say who he was.

 You know people like that. When he met a monster,

 He’d encourage the monster to talk about eating

 But failed to say that he objected to being prey.”

 

 

(“Conversation with a Monster”)

 

I have had a disability all my life. Every now and then I meet a monster. What’s interesting about these experiences is “the monster” is always a person in conditional authority–a bag man as they say in the Mafia. Once in awhile it’s a chief, but not often. 

 

If you’re a real veteran of disability advocacy and “self-advocacy” you’ve learned how to say “I object to being eaten” and then, by turns, you make yourself inedible. 

 

It’s not easy out here in the forest. 

 

A former president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges once bullied me behind a closed door–he was trying to get rid of me–I was just an adjunct professor. He offered me a job driving a golf cart. I kid you not. He was going to take me out of teaching, and put me in charge of summer sports camps for teenagers. I would essentially hand out towels and he wanted to know if I could manage to drive around campus. I told him I was blind. (He already knew this of course. Monsters usually size up their victims.)

 

“Don’t tell me about being blind,” he said. “My room mate in college was an Olympic rower and he was blind. You’re obviously not competitive enough.”

 

The great thing about monsters is that they lack logic. They’re so hungry. As an old Finnish cook book says: “Never pick mushrooms when you are hungry. Always use great care.”

 

Real men don’t eat quiche. Real disability advocates refuse to be prey. Of monsters there are many. But you can starve them out.

 

S.K.