Do you Glorify Disabled People for Getting out of Bed?
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Is there secretly a part of you that is prejudice towards disabled people?
I spent a solid hour writing and re-writing this piece glorifying the lives of disabled people and essentially making them out to be beautiful creatures that we need to spend time pouring into in order to make sure they live full lives. I went so far as to compare the lives of disabled youth to new puppies that people want to adopt/help, and once disabled people enter into adulthood they are compared more similarly to dogs in the shelter that people aren’t as willing to help.
In thinking more about this comparison, I realized I was mistaken on so many levels. To begin with I realized that in order to talk to or about disabled people I tend to make them out to be amazing people that I need to fight for and defend.
What baffled me the most about telling myself that I have to defend someone with disabilities is that the only reason to feel like I need to go into battle for them is because I think that they cannot do the same for themselves. So, is there some prejudice in my heart that I need to fix? Yes, definitely and I will fully own up to that and make conscious attempts to actively change that.
Essentially, sometimes you just have to slap yourself, my slap was well deserved because I’d been tooting my own horn for being so aware of the needs of disabled people when in reality I wasn’t showing them the highest form of respect they deserve. This also relates to what terms we refer to disabled people with. For example, why do we continuously say, “autistic person” or “disabled person”? To flip those two words even in that small phrase would be monumental because we would be putting the person before the disability, its easy to just say “the boy who has autism”.
Thinking more about my previous mindset of disabled people I am reminded of an idea brought up by comedian and journalist Stella Young who happens to be in a wheelchair. Young brings up the idea that we have completely objectified people with disabilities in attempt to inspire able-bodied people.
Young urges us to stop glorifying and objectifying people for being themselves.
“I want to live in a world where we don’t have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own name.”
— Stella Young
When we glorify disabled people for doing less than they are capable we set a standard or a bar and if they reach that basic standard they can be praised. Why would we not strive to push them further?
My mom is the perfect example of trying to push disabled people further than they think they are capable of. For the past ten years she has been a special education teacher and has pushed these students and plied the stigmas out of their brains that they think are their own limitations.
She told me that her most hated stigma is that disabled people are basically growing bodies with a child’s brain stuck inside.
A student of hers named Jonah is a person with down syndrome (notice I didn’t say he “struggles with” or “lives with”, he is simply a person with down syndrome.) Jonah would often run away from his teachers and you couldn’t chase him because he would run faster. Jonah was a textbook example of someone that we would say has a “child’s brain” and people thought he couldn’t think.
One day Jonah was upset with my mom and ran away from her as fast as he could, straight out the classroom doors and into the parking lot, then he got to the street corner and looked both ways twice. Don’t you think if he lacked decision making skills he wouldn’t have stopped to look both ways? Jonah worked his butt off in transitional school and is now a greeter at Microsoft. Yes, you heard me Microsoft, you know the big corporation?
Jonah is a fully capable human being and his down syndrome is just an added spice to who he is. If you saw Jonah would you first think that he was an inspiration? Do you feel like you need to defend disabled people because they can’t do it for themselves? So, I’ll ask you one last thing, where do you see some prejudice in your heart?