Last night in tony Mt. Kisco New York I pushed a friend’s manual wheelchair up a snowy and steep sidewalk. In order to push I had to heel my guide dog and steer the chair with one hand, the dog following. Expensive cars whispered past. All the cars in Mt. Kisco are BMWs or Mercedes; the basest rig is a Range Rover.
I imagined the drivers who saw us thought we were homeless men, sad war veterans, poor and defeated cripples making our way by means of mutual aid. Probably some of them thought: “There but for the grace of God go I.” Or they shivered. Or they thought nothing at all. But its a good bet they thought something akin to the above.
And what they wouldn’t have known is that we are two esteemed scholars, professors at noteworthy colleges, that we’d been talking of bio-ethics, contemporary politics, the changing nature of the human body in an age of astonishing technologies. That we were alive and willfully happy with our careers, our friendship, and the fresh falling snow.
Americans still haven’t learned how to read disability. They tend to get the semiotics wrong. We were laughing our asses off.
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Planet of the Blind 