Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Walker
has taught me
to pay attention
to the present,
and to what is,
rather than what is supposed to be.
He has taught me to pay attention to the back beat.
He has made me
I think more patient, certainly
Subtler.
And because I can go to him
and abandon
my futile, vain,
Self-involved,
self-aggrandizing
expectations, he has
become for me
a respite
from the harsh
grind of the survival of the fittest.
A geneticist once described Walker as
a mistake of physical evolution.
And he is a mistake of physical evolution.
But I think in terms of our social development,
our ethical development as a species,
Walker and people like him
are probably enormously important. Fragility
can be
a form of strength.
Because it forces you to think outside of the box.
It forces you
to be radical, as I once tried to write for
Louise.
Disability is,
by definition, radical and beyond the status quo, outside of the status quo.
And that, especially these days,
is so rare.
In being a representative of imperfection, I think
Walker reminds all of us that none of us are wholly responsible
for our success.
And that's a good thing because in a meritocratic society
like we live in,
where the better you are the further ahead you get,
the problem with a meritocratic society is it begins to believe that
success is the only crown of virtue.
There is a flaw in the meritocratic argument,
and Walker reminds me of that.
I traveled to France and I went to a L’Arche community
run by Jean Vanier, you've probably heard of him. They operate on a very different
principle. The communities there, and they are genuine communities -houses of
eight, four houses in a little pod,
six pods to a little village,
three villages within
five miles of one another, throughout France and a 180 places around the
world.
The defining impulse of those communities is not to make
the disabled like us.
It is to introduce us
to the lives of the disabled as they live them.
Today, those communities are, I think, most progressive model
of how we
can deal
with this very pressing problem of housing people with severe
intellectual disabilities.
I have a dream sometimes.
In my dream,
there are these communities where people like Walker can live.
And they have their own lives, and we are allowed to visit.
And you’re allowed to visit in particular kinds of studios that are built in
between their homes. So if you're a lawyer with that argument to make, a
Supreme Court
argument you have to dream up, or a painter, or a musician, or
a business student who has a PhD to write, or you are a novelist or you
just want some time to yourself to think and read,
you can go and live in that community.
And you don’t have to take care of anybody.
All you have to do is have breakfast
and lunch and dinner everyday in one of the houses,
and once a week,
you have to give somebody a bath.
You have to touch imperfection
physically,
that's all you have to do.
And you can stay for a month.
And I think that would change the world.
Not because it will change the lives of the disabled,
but because it will change the way we see our own
imperfection.