Because I have an apparent disability I’m often in front of audiences that only like me conditionally. If you have a disability and you’re in public in ways either great or small you’ll automatically know what I’m talking about–there’s an unspoken appraisal as the person with a disability begins speaking, a collective, silent, projective gentlemen’s agreement that nothing uncomfortable shall be spoken.
My friend Gary calls this the “don’t piss in the shrimp dip” phenomenon. (He’s from Texas.) You know of course what I’m talking about. We know that Franklin Roosevelt lived his post-polio life this way. The agreement is that if you never mention the profound, compensatory ardor that’s required to live, to really live, then the audience gets to imagine that living is relatively easy. Instead of “gentlemen’s agreement” we might call it “the Hallmark agreement” after the commercial greeting card company famed for its commercialization of easy sentiment.
I am invited to speak at all kinds of venues and I’m lucky to have these opportunities. But I have been trying for some time now to resist the Hallmark agreement, to simply encourage my audience to imagine that disability is easy. (That script goes like this: ‘If a person with a disability simply has the right accommodations, then disability is nothing more than a minor nuisance, etc.)
Ah but the biggest problem is that disability still troubles the public nerve. (A public nerve besotted with advertising, hence, a nerve that believes–for in America the nerves believe–that there’s an easy road ahead if we just whistle or lip synch like Beyonce.) So we are expected to say that even the most difficult and perilous things are easy. Forget that the New York City subway system is inaccessible to people who use wheelchairs; forget that the meager elevators in that system are often malfunctioning, so a man with a wheelchair will, should he actually get on the subway, find himself trapped, unable to exit. Or forget that blind people still have no access to movies or television or public performances. Or forget that the majority of American universities don’t teach sign language or, if they do, don’t recognize it as a language that might meet the university’s advertised foreign language requirement.
Each if threes failures will, in turn prevent people from getting ahead, And my job is to cheer up the audience?
Beware the Hallmark. I like uplift as much as the next man or woman but I don’t think it can come at the expense of communitarian politics.
If you create what the disability rights movement likes to call ‘an even playing field” you lift up your black brothers and sisters, and your deaf ones, and your Latino ones, your blind ones. And please stop pretending Its easy.
Posted with Blogsy
Planet of the Blind 
YES!! It is so difficult and exhausting! Hang in there and I appreciate your blog so much that I frequently refer others to it!!
LikeLike