Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Yeah, the ugly laws, that was in New York. I don’t think, well like if you’re ugly,
don’t be in public. (Right and if you’re different, don’t be in public. Underlying
prejudice a lot). Yes, in society. One occasion was when I was using crutches and braces and
I came up to a counter in a government office and I saw the woman’s face when she first
saw me. And as I approached how her face changed from being an ordinary expression to a horror
and aversion. And appalled, she was appalled and didn’t want to talk to me. That was
a radicalizing experience right there. When I got the message that to society and the
world at large I was some kind of, I hate to say, monster, but yeah. So really disabled
people were never seen in public and that just includes people in wheelchairs and I
even wrote an article here for one of CIL’s booklets and you never see disabled people
in Indiana and it was true. People just didn’t go out. As I described before, you just couldn’t
get anywhere, why bother. And on the other hand, people were so not used to seeing disabled
people, you would think we didn’t exist. And I think probably most people, and they
had an idea that there weren’t very many people like that, that extreme, which means
using a wheelchair. Or, like myself, crutches and braces. No, you just never saw people
and the message was real clear that they just didn’t want to see you. It made people very
uncomfortable. People were fine with not looking at me, not talking to me. I always felt that
I was, it was my job to put people at ease, and people with disabilities still experience
that to some extent, but not like back then. It was my job to make it okay for people to
be in my presence and to talk to me and to assure them that I was capable of talking
and could carry on a conversation. So it was really intense in those days. It was really
difficult. And it always seemed to be a double-edged reality, like things, it always felt like
society never made itself accessible, or why build a ramp if nobody comes. Well it always
seemed to me, in my little political analysis, that they also didn’t want us. So it was
a self-fulfilling philosophy, that “we don’t want you here and so we’re not going to
be accessible” and “nobody comes and wants to get in here, so why should we be accessible.”
And it was a loop that kept that going. I need water.