Excerpt from: Planet of the Blind (click for full article)
Ah but the biggest problem is that disability still troubles the public nerve. (A public nerve besotted with advertising, hence, a nerve that believes--for in America the nerves believe--that there's an easy road ahead if we just whistle or lip synch like Beyonce.) So we are expected to say that even the most difficult and perilous things are easy. Forget that the New York City subway system is inaccessible to people who use wheelchairs; forget that the meager elevators in that system are often malfunctioning, so a man with a wheelchair will, should he actually get on the subway, find himself trapped, unable to exit. Or forget that blind people still have no access to movies or television or public performances. Or forget that the majority of American universities don't teach sign language or, if they do, don't recognize it as a language that might meet the university's advertised foreign language requirement.
Each if threes failures will, in turn prevent people from getting ahead, And my job is to cheer up the audience?
Beware the Hallmark. I like uplift as much as the next man or woman but I don't think it can come at the expense of communitarian politics.
If you create what the disability rights movement likes to call 'an even playing field" you lift up your black brothers and sisters, and your deaf ones, and your Latino ones, your blind ones. And please stop pretending Its easy.
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