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Good Evening
I believe that progress is found in our level of consciousness
and not in our technological developments.
A month ago I had the enormous privilege to go to Guadalajara,
to the Parapan American games.
It was an amazing experience.
The energy one feels there cannot be felt anywhere else.
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Go to the village, just to go to the dining area, where there are hundreds of athletes
who have been training for over four years for a competition
that could last a minute or five minutes!
That’s passion! That’s heart!
When you’re close to it, you get goose bumps just from seeing these people putting so much into it.
It was good for us, since we went with 99 athletes
and came back with 18 gold medals.
The previous games we came back with 2. That is an important growth.
Jaimer Cantillo, the human rock! From Santa Marta to the world!
Normally, for the untrained eye, to watch a weight lifting competition could be so boring,
but not when the human rock is there.
The guy brings all the folklore, the Caribbean and the Latin fury.
He shouts his daughter’s name out loud as he lifts that thing!
He was great there.
He broke the Parapan American record, qualified for London, and brought us home one of those 18 medals.
Boy, to be in that stadium
and see the Colombian flag being lifted while listening to the national anthem brought a tear to my eye.
But wait, it was the Colombian flag, not the flag for the disabled of Colombia.
It was the Colombian anthem, not the anthem for Colombians in wheelchairs.
Jainer was representing all of us, not just a small segment.
Another cool anecdote is the one of the guys from wheelchair-basketball.
They had to play against Canada in the semi-finals
and won at the last second in something that could have give me a hart attack!
To win over the Canadians in the Pan American games
is like scoring 5 goals against Argentina in the Monumental Stadium of Buenos Aires.
Everyone flipped out from excitement; they lost it! It was unexpected, nobody bet on that happening!
Nevertheless, who went out to the streets to spread flour around in celebration?
Did anyone go out and stop traffic and get loud?
Boy, this was on the media. Yet, not in the way it could have been.
This was a merit that deserved major fanfare.
It didn’t happen.
Isn’t strange that we have the mindset to celebrate certain things and not others?
Going a step forward,
isn’t it strange that in Guadalajara we had the Parapan American games separate from the Pan American games?
I mean, why do we segregate this?
Why is there an Olympic movement and then a Paralympic movement if the sports are the same?
It is track and field, swimming…the disability is just another category.
In track and field, why not have 100 meters for men, 100 meters for women,
100 meters for men in wheelchairs, and 100 meters for women in wheelchairs?
If we are segregating two movements, why stop there?
Shouldn’t we also have one Olympics for men and another separate Olympic games for women?
Well, it’s the same thing right?
Or we could segregate it by religion, political interest or any of those sub-categories that we use to determine ourselves.
It is strange but real.
How things should be, for instance, is to have a fusion among the games and have it divided up by categories.
But we are very far from that.
I work in this area, and agree that it would be a mistake to mix the London Olympics with the Paralympics.
Why? Because they are not yet on the same level.
To understand this better, lets talk about football, which is a common denominator for us all.
Why do we react by laughing at the idea of having Olympic games for men and others for women,
but think it is perfectly normal to have a football world cup for men and another, even in a different city or country, for women?
Well, the thing is that the institution of men’s football has been around for longer, it has more history and a longer path.
And if there is a final in the next world cup, lets say Brazil vs. the Netherlands,
and the same countries go to the final for the women’s cup, boy, nobody is going to watch that one!
We have to give that movement time to penetrate our culture.
Get conscious about how marvelous it is as well, and in this way, give it the importance that it deserves.
We definitely have many teams. Men, women…
This is, for instance, the photo of the guys-blind as bats!-who represented us in Guadalajara!
They brought back home the bronze, they are so good! Blind.
Have you seen football for blind people?
It’s the trainer off the field shouting: Here! Here! Here! Here! And the guys just kicking away!
Imagine that! Imagine the talent that one must have!
If we cover Ronaldihno’s eyes, could he do that? Maybe not…
So in football there are things that we accept as valid, like segregating the games,
and in other sports like tennis we simply don't.
Why do we think that it’s normal during Wimbledon for the men’s and women’s finals to be played on the same day, on the same court?
Why do we know who Sharapova, the Williams, and then Djokovic and Nadal are?
And we feel that the show is on the same level.
We would pay the same amount of money to get either ticket.
This is because for this movement things started for women and men at the same time.
But off course, for those exiting finals we are still missing the category of the disabled.
I think that progress is found in our level of consciousness and not in our technological developments.
It is in understanding what we know as ‘normal’.
For instance it was normal 50 years ago to have a water fountain for colored people to drink from, and another for white people to drink from.
That the colored sit in one part of the bus and the colorless in another.
That we segregate this! No so much time has passed.
Just 50 years.
That’s why I like sports so much. It is a great medium for activism, and for bringing those conventions of rights
- which attorneys write about just for other attorneys to understand-
to a more tangible reality that everyone can understand.
Here is where the Jackie Robinsons come into the picture, where the Muhammad Alis come into the picture,
the [Tommie] Smiths and [John] Carlos: all those who have use the sport as a tool for bringing those conventions to the ground.
There is a convention about disability: “The convention of the United Nations for people with disabilities.”
That is a kick in the behind that nobody is going to read!
We try to put that language into understandable terms, chewing a little bit on them is to put it into clear terms.
We did something called ‘The Segregator Project” to bring this issue of segregation to an extreme.
What if you are segregated for being bald or fat or for having glasses?
Look what can happen with that! Let’s roll the video.
We did this in… Thank you.
We did this in Bogotá, Buenos Aires and Tokyo.
I’d die to see other versions! It is funny to see how the different cultures would have a different reaction.
The Latinos protested every time: - but why, no why? – Always, like the law is designed to screw me over.
The Japanese obeyed every time, it didn’t make a lot of sense to them neither, but they would go: -“理解する” - and then they would go somewhere else.
For them the law is there to protect them all. They are at a different level of consciousness.
What we were looking with this, was to bring the people to a level of consciousness, to understand the reality of people with disabilities.
In our culture there are 3 ways to understand disability, or 3 paradigms:
The first one is called ‘the traditional’:
Disability is understood as something mystical, karmic, right?
So…the parents were very bad people and God sent them a boy on a wheelchair, so they would learn for what they have done!
It happens in every sector of society. Very sadly in some towns, kids with cerebral palsy get literally shackled to the bed,
because there is shame in taking them to the park or to church, as people would point at them.
Or among super high-class people,
the entrepreneur that suffers from a cerebrovascular accident would stop going to the social club or to restaurants, because he or she feels ashamed.
People would point at him and think: That guy didn’t used to be fair to his employees,
or he had many affairs or something like that, that is why God sent him, oh my lord…
Right? We associate it with extraterrestrial forces, and not with something more tangible.
Then we get a little bit civilized, and the medical paradigm comes.
It explains disability as an illness.
These people are patients, they are sub-normal, and if they join rehabilitation, get more therapy, they would reach the level of the normal ones.
It makes a lot of sense. If I do more therapy and learn how to leap with this chair, I could hop on a sidewalk and my life would be easier.
But I ask myself, why would I have to adapt to the sidewalk, and not the sidewalk to me?
This is the third paradigm, the one of human rights.
It describes disability as the relation between two things: the individual and its environment.
It is a concept for example like racism, or machismo.
Someone targeted doesn’t bring with him “the racism.”
What he or she has is a skin color, and when he or she interacts with barriers that someone might have in their head, the correlation between those two would turn into racism.
In the same way, I don't have a disability, what I have is that I cannot walk.
When that not been able to walk comes across a bus without a ramp, or with a jerk boss who thinks that I need my feet to answer the telephone,
the correlation between those two things is disability.
Look, for me it is easy to understand this, because I live on this chair, I feel it.
So let’s say for me it is easier to recognize and interpret these type of things.
Nevertheless, all of us should be activists supporting these movements,
because this is not a problem that only the ones embodying the disability should care for, but all of us!
All of us get upset about racism, and all of us got upset with El Bolillo (Gómez).
This is something that concerns us all, and it is a disease in society that we must change.
There are other subjects that we have forgotten.
My friend Erika’s father went to the county side 7 years ago, to check on a land he wanted to buy.
Walking around it he stood on a landmine and died.
For my friend Erika it is easy to hate that, for her it is easy to say that there is no God, no political cause, no war,
and there is no peace that can justify the use of landmines.
For the rest of us, yes, it is bad, it is horrible,
but it is something that happens in a remote place called “war,” which doesn’t have a lot to do with me.
But of course it has to do with all of us.
What can we do to bring that problem in front of us?
Maybe if we have it on top of the table and we stop ignoring it, we can help to solve it.
We did an experiment in this sense too. Let me show you…
The conscience itself has a marvelous power, it has an unstoppable energy and achieves wonderful things.
We just told the people, go to the streets with your trousers rolled up today, think for a moment that this is real, it is happening in my country.
And, amazing things started to happen on their own.
Just by seeding consciousness about it, we forced the government to react.
The private sector wanted to hire survivors; the media started talking about this.
All just by seeding consciousness.
That is the limitless power that this has.
What we saw, what really moved me, was to receive videos from small towns and provinces
where kids had ceremonies in their schools showing them rolling up their trousers, too.
These kids are going to grow up knowing that landmines are not normal, and not something that they have to get used to.
Now, what can we do so that all the kids of this country know not only that,
but also that racism, classism, the apathy that is eating from the inside this country and its society are not normal and we don't have to tolerate all this?
What do we have to change in our routines? What do we have around us? What can we do? To build a world that is really possible for all of us.
When is humanity going to wake up and realize that beauty is diversity? Right?
And, that the goal that we have in our minds, is that even if we are independent human beings, each of us with different characteristics,
among all we form a big state of consciousness.
Yes! We all are one big organism.
In the moment that we come to understand that; that we start to interiorize it and have it in our guts,
the panic and fear that the difference creates, will stop from causing so much pain.
Boy, we could have state of the art technology; we could have bigger planes and faster cars.
We could even have first-class public policy and great infrastructure,
but if we don't understand that growth starts inside, from our humanity, if we don’t enlarge our consciousness,
well, forget about everything then…
Many thanks.