Month: November 2015

“Well what do you want?” asks the ableist.

“We have to weigh your request for assistance against all the other non-disabled people’s requests.”

The ableist is in her forties, young enough to know better, was educated at a university, must have come into contact with feminism. Surely knows about equality. That’s the rub. She knows and has decided she doesn’t care.

Educated ableism is the worst.

I can take the cab driver in (name your city) who’s country of origin has no “out and about” disabled. He sees a man, dressed rather professionally (suit and tie, even pants…) who happens to be blind—who’s traveling with a professionally trained dog, and he’s never seen such a thing. Never. For the cabbie, the very idea of a successful, self-navigating, fully engaged blind person is without analogy. He decides to drive away, leaving the man and dog to contemplate what’s now called “micro-aggression”.

Ah, but educated ableism is absolutely the worst.

Yesterday a student at Syracuse University, who shall remain unidentified, told me how she was recently humiliated by a professor. She’s an autist. She has to wear headphones—Bose noise cancellation headphones. There are moments when the world is too much with her. It doesn’t matter where she is. She needs a break.

She put on her Bose in the midst of a lecture.

The professor accosted her, even though she has letters on her person from the Office of Disability Services explaining her accommodation.

Educated ableism is the worst.

The educated ableist believes he or she is freed from having to ask questions.

Such freedom does not generally exist in the worlds of ideas, so the assumption, the grand self-absorbed interior contract that an educated ableist must make is highly solipsistic fiction.

Some days I walk across campus, and here I mean any campus for I travel widely, speak at all kinds of colleges and universities, and recognize how sculpted and interiorized are faculty who stare at me as I approach on sidewalks. They think because I’m blind I can’t see them staring, taking their surveys, driving their educated projectionist ableism into my thorax with their eyes.

“Here’s another clue for you all…” The blind can tell you’re staring.

They can tell you’re sizing them up or down.

I have plenty of academic colleagues who size me down.

And yes, of course there are plenty who don’t.

Yet, I expect more from academic administrators, professors, even the meter maid.

Now, the educated ableist is bad, no question. But there are still worse things.

For instance, there’s the disabled faculty member who likes to “rank” on other disabled people.

My black colleagues know this biz. It’s the old, “are you black enough” thing.

In the disability world, where there are all too few faculty with disabilities, and accordingly you’d think they would work tightly together, one can encounter the professor who thinks his or her way of navigating or advocating for disability is not only superior to other methods, but is so far superior that (insert topic here) is beneath acknowledgment.

You know what I mean. “I was “on” this issue of accessible widgets long before you were. I’m a better disabled person than you…”

Ableism within the disability community. Imagine that.

It’s a long road to Tipperary.

Tipperary is my code word for dignified, universal, respectful inclusion.

“It’s a long way to go…”

 

Here are some words about longing. They fall like yellow leaves in the crotch of a birch with two trunks, so that some words appear to stand and others are folded, even torn.

Longing is the green inside us, green as it was, the mercenary fictional. Like goodness, whatever is longed for doesn’t live in nature. The affection for green is like cutting your own skin.

I like it when a poet, speaking of his children, says “I did not know you before you came” and I like it when green is in my dreams. But I’m an old man now. Green is my undoing.

An old Buddhist proverb says: “If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is walk.”

Scuffing the leaves…

Someone is always triggering my fight or flee instincts. The mean guy raking leaves yells at me for letting my dog sniff his grass. The jerk on the phone who wants to sell me yet another mortgage. “Mortgage is rooted in death,” I tell him, “and there I was having such a nice day until you called.” He was just trying to get by. Even the grim raker was trying to get by. He has his own problems. Me? I’m just a nervous system trapped in a bag of water. A great electrified amoeba. My college education won’t change the fact. I feel like running into the street and shouting: “But I wanted so much more!”

The other night I got into a conversation with a pal of mine. We admitted our respective issues with “original sin”. I said: “Lots of atheists, Christopher Hitchens especially, like to think of original sin as spiritual totalitarianism. But I don’t know—I think I was born vain, and while vanity has served me well in many instances, it’s of no use when confronting mortality.”

We talked for some time. Hitchens died believing in nothing. He was unbowed. I liked him for that.

For sin one could substitute “defects” (though not disability). Defects of character. I’m not scouring myself.

I am lonely. Time will say nothing but I told you so. Time only knows the price we have to pay.

Tell that guy with the rake he’s missed a spot.

Sunday night, leaves falling and the wet earth smells of mold as if the yard is now a forgotten cellar, its builders long gone. And the pain in my chest is familiar, so human I am humbled. My original sin has always been vanity—I believed in myself to extremes. I couldn’t see, but was smarter than the other children. But tonight I smell the dank roots of the apple trees, hear the snorts of deer grazing in the dark, and know the thin, moon-glow fall to earth—see it, that is, and know we scent the going first.