(It seems like tonight is the night to talk about social issues)
I don't think I ever really understood why disabled was such an... incomplete word, a completely off-the-mark phrase, until this past year of university. Which is sad, because we all pretend we're totally understanding of everyone's issues, and we try and tell ourselves that everyone is equal, but there's usually this little seed of doubt in us about some issue, seeds of doubt that we should have gotten rid of before we reached adulthood. Not to make myself sound like the scum of the Earth before this year - we all know somebody who thinks that "a eugenic solution to disability wouldn't be so bad" and we stand their with our mouths agape at their atrocity, and we get to say, "Well, I'm not as bad as THAT GUY, am I right?"
Anyway, for my bioethics class, I read a few articles on "disability" and a few articles about the standards of health and wellness, examining whether there are problems with stuff like the UN's definition of good health. And all this reading boils down to this point that really just, hit me.
I don't know how to say it.
I can't run a marathon. I can't do it, I'm sorry. It's just not in my power right now, and maybe it will never be. I will probably never be in good enough physical condition to win a gold olympic medal. I'll never beat Usain Bolt in a foot race. And I'll never rock climb as fast as Hans Florine. My god, you should have seen me rock climb in highschool. Like an awkward goose I was. It's not pretty. I'm glad nobody brought cameras to class. And you know what else? I wouldn't be able to do advanced calculus without at least a hell of a lot of paper and a pencil, let alone ever do it in my mind.
Why is this important, you may ask? Of course nobody expects me to be able to do these things. Most people I know can't do them either. No big deal, right? Who cares if I can't do all these things?
When I look up the definition of "disabled", I get:
(of a person) having a physical or mental condition that limits movements, senses, or activities.
To be disabled is to be limited in a physical, cognitive, mental, sensory, emotional, developmental or other way, to be unable to do something that another human being can do with ease.
Do you get it, yet? That's literally almost every fucking human being on this goddamn planet. My current physical and mental existence cannot without a doubt achieve at least a million and one different feats that are possible to someone on the planet Earth. If I listed all of the things I can't do now, and added all the things I'll never be able to do... I would be here for days at least, if not a week. Someone labeled "disabled" can only do one or two less things than I can off this list of a million things. I'm no paragon of physical and mental fortitude compared to them, I am not intrinsically better than them in some way.
"But," someone says in dismay, "you can still do all the normal things. You're still a functioning human being". And to that I would respond, how exactly do we define what is the norm of human ability when everyone excels and fails at different things? Sure, most of us share some of the very basic traits of what is capable of the human species, and some people lack those traits. But if I was put in a room full of people who can do handstands for ten minutes straight, and I am the only person in the room that can't do that, nobody in that room would be granted the right to call me disabled just because I can't do something everybody else here can. Some of those people probably can't even whistle, or bake a good cake, or write an 8 page paper on Quantum Theory (side note: I'm still waiting for my marks back on that essay, hurry up professor I am so impatient).
"No," the naysayer still reprimands me, "disabled people are just people who can't do things that are necessary to take care of themselves or keep themselves healthy on their own, that's what makes them different". And there's so much wrong with this definition. For large portions of our life we will need to rely on someone else in order to survive, to do our job efficiently, to get some task done. Not just when we are an infant or when we are on our death bed. Even our mental health usually relies on social interactions. There are few to no people who would be completely healthy and well on their own. The extent to which we need other people does not make us more or less human. It's our need and tendency for community and cooperation that actually distinguishes human action and human morality.
We are all limited in some way, genetically or environmentally; we all rely heavily on the existence of others in some way or another; we all have different strengths and weaknesses that end up playing a role in defining what our function is in society. Having some limitations that are more severe than some arbitrary standardized norm of what we think the "perfectly average human" is...we're ignorant for ever treating people like this with disdain or thinking that we deserve more in life than they do.
"Okay, you politically correct shmob, what do we get to call disabled people then?" How about you actually refer to what notable disabilities they have that interfere with their well-being instead of treating them as some less-than-human object? Describe the situation rather than having it wholly define them, like "___ has paralysis" or "____is deaf" or "____ has to use a wheelchair". Or simply, "___ has disabilities/ a disability" instead of saying "____ is disabled", since we haven't come up with a perfect and well-accepted term to get rid of the connotations of "dis" ability.
I used to think the phrase "differently abled" was kind of just something used by over-sensitive hippies, or people who have someone with a major disability in their family and wanted to be as kind as possible to them. I didn't realize that they were using the phrase that was actually just more correct, regardless of its political worth.
