One of the lasting things about studying disability and its history is there are so many things you can’t unsee. Jean Jacques Rousseau had a ghastly urethra and couldn’t urinate or did so without forewarning. It wasn’t his opinions that caused him to be a detested house guest.
Disability is everywhere once you learn to look for it. Or not. Let’s say you weren’t searching. You’d no interest in Alexander Graham Bell’s wife Mabel who was deaf and you’d no curiosity about “the why” of the telephone–that it was intended as a hearing aid of sorts. What does it mean to find this out?
I’m no fan of those posters you see, the ones that say “did you know these people had invisible disabilities?” But I do like knowing disability is customary.
Which is the point: it’s part of nature, part of us. And it’s a prominent part of us. Which in turn means that discomfort with disability is nothing more than a discomfort with humanity and the world itself.
I wish bigots would just get to the point: “we hate the world.”
Disney makes plenty of money off of this.
I know my disabled face interferes with their horizons.
Planet of the Blind 