When I was a kid the boy next door used to throw sticks at me and call me “Blindo” and he even came up with a little song to embellish his measly act. By the age of five I understood how it would be: smug, able bodied cruelties would be run of the mill stuff henceforth. I was reminded of this yesterday while talking with disability studies scholar and blogger William Peace as he described the routine humiliations he experiences every time he goes to the airport and the airline personnel see his wheelchair.
I’m just now home from a trip to New York City where I experienced the disdain of several cab drivers–many cabbies hate guide dogs and will drive right by if I attempt to hail a taxi on my own. I have many gambits to thwart this–I get hotel doormen or strangers to flag a cab, instructing them to hold the door handle so the driver can’t hit the gas when he sees he’s been tricked. And I get in the cab, struggling with dog and bags (for no driver helps you anymore) and sit scrunched in intolerable yogic misery of a filthy car with a dog under my feet and endure the patent hostility of the driver.
I’ve lived with this patent hostility all my life. I know it like the floor plan of my boyhood house. I try like hell not to live in the world of disdainful assessments, shrug off the ugly stares and snarls–for there’s plenty of snarling as any person with a disability can tell you.
The shrugging is fairly easy, customary, a routine. But what really gets on my nerves is organized disability discrimination. On Friday last, while riding in a cab to Grand Central Station I was treated to a blurt of televised propaganda from the Bloomberg administration. If you haven’t been to New York lately you may not know that every cab now has a flat screen TV affixed to the back of the front seat. You’re forced to watch and listen to canned news and entertainment segments–local weather, “Jimmy Kimmel Live”–and then, Lo and Behold I was treated to a protectively false advertisement from the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, outlining a new generation of accessible Nissan taxis soon to appear on the streets. What the casual viewer doesn’t know is that the Bloomberg administration has done everything it can to insure there will be very few accessible cabs and that riders with wheelchairs will experience long delays in calling for one.
Disability rights activists have argued that all new cabs should be accessible and I agree.
What’s worse than overt cruelty? Dishonesty.
Posted with Blogsy
Planet of the Blind 
Sounds like the. IDEA special education laws. They are required to “consider” your rights to education, then send you to the segregated class rooms.
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They (cabdrivers) do this to blind people with guide dogs in Toronto too, refusing to pick them up to provide service, which by law they cannot refuse a person with a guide dog. I was told that many Muslim taxi drivers see dogs as unclean and so do not want this animal in their vehicle. I’d like to know if this the real reason as guide dogs are not a nuisance, so I do not know why the refusal.
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