I acknowledge that until I read my own post did I realize my blind spot towards racism. Thank you for recognizing it and pointing it out to me.
ETA: fantastic post btw.
You know what, though? My father wasn’t some Super-Dude. He was a regular guy with normal abilities who happened to have one less arm than most people. What he had that was “different” was an attitude of “find a way to do it”. My expectations of people, “able” or “disabled”, is to do everything one possibly can to be self sufficient. What is possible certainly varies greatly, but I think is often underestimated by not only society but by people themselves.
I’ve never met Ambi, but if I did I would not presume to determine what is possible for him and what is not until he indicates such to me. If I were to get to know him well and he maintained that a particular task is not possible when I think it may be, I would likely challenge him on it. I hate to see anyone “settle”.
Something tells me that Ambi doesn’t sell himself short very often, though. 
I’m not an ableist. It’s like all the other ‘isms’, what I care about is how people treat me. One of my favorite haunts used to have a customer without working legs, he could get his wheelchair in and out, not that hard, but for years one of us would carry him in to a seat because that’s what he preferred. I had to drop of the list of volunteers a few years back when my knees were in the worst shape, and he’s no longer with us, but I don’t recall anyone there ever looking down on this man for his lack of mobility.
I’m a little baffled at how this causes problems. I can understand people can feel a little uncomfortable with unfamiliar situations, but it’s so easy to just put that aside and get to know a person and that unease should melt away rapidly. How sheltered do you have to be not to encounter someone with a physical disability in this country?
Perhaps one contributing factor making my comments appear “extreme” is that I attempted to identify some concerns briefly, in response to an undefined term.
My primary concern is with the distribution of limited resources and marginal returns. Take school special ed for example. I would attempt to assess the beneficial result of applying more and more resources towards a profoundly impaired child with the prospect of marginal returns. I might question whether that overburdens the school system, and takes resources away from other students. I also might suggest that those resources would be better applied to assisting the disabled person throughout the course of their life.
Now if we had unlimited resources, my opinions might differ.
In no way do I say deny all special ed/accommodations. Instead, I suggest that the fact that someone considers themselves impaired and deserving of an accommodation, does not necessarily make it so in my mind.
Similar concerns apply to each of my other statements.
Or maybe I’m a horrible jerk - don’t want to rule out that possibility.
Can you give an example of this “hampering”? Is there a specific instance of able-bodied people being unfairly hindered in the pursuit of an activity or destination by a requirement of accessibility?
There’s far too many types of disability to have a single policy towards all disabled people.
I try to deal with all people based on generalised equality, one of my bosses is a 1 armed woman and that was awkward for a while in the whole ‘should I hold doors’ area of things.
I’m probably quite ableist though; I find a lot of the Special Olympics quite grotesque, seeing someone do gymnastics with no legs is really offputting to me, on a visceral level…it feels like I’m watching a freak show but it’s meant to be okay because the ringmaster is the Olympic committee.
I also dislike when disabled people are fawned over and called heroes for doing normal things… as if the default expectation is that they should give up and die and the fact that they don’t is worthy of excessive praise.
It’s a very very tough issue… both tough to clearly and unambiguously discuss, and tough to grapple with. A few thoughts:
(1) If I was going to have a baby, and early genetic testing determined that the baby was going to be blind, or deaf, or missing limbs, or paralyzed, or with down’s syndrome; and if there was sufficiently advanced genetic manipulation available to fix that, I would (consulting with my wife of course, who would have a bigger vote than mine) have that fix applied without a moment’s hesitation. The same would certainly not be true of a baby who was female-instead-of-male, or the wrong race (well, if my wife was pregnant with a baby that was the wrong race, that’s another conversation entirely, but I hope my point is clear). I’d like to think that being aware of that distinction doesn’t mean that I think someone who is blind is less valuable as a human being… but “blindness” certainly isn’t something that I view as a purely neutral trait, the same way that gender or hair color is.
(2) Going a bit further, and starting to verge on the dangerously eugenic, genetic disorders that lead to sufficient mental/psychological abnormality (Down’s Syndrome being the obvious one) in fact result in people who, in the extreme, I believe are “less human” and “less valuable”. Which is in many ways a terrible thing to say, and something that it would be VERY dangerous for the government to start enacting into law… but at the same time, all the truly wonderful things that make humans human, art and self awareness and literature and science and so forth, are all things that profoundly mentally disabled people are extraordinarily unlikely to appreciate or contribute to compared with someone who is neurotypical. Again, a terrible thing to say, and not something that should ever actually start being encoded into law or policy because of how dangerous the precedent and slippery slope could be… but I’m not going to pretend I don’t think it’s true. As a family example, I had a first cousin with Down’s Syndrome. His parents loved him fiercely and would bristle at any hint that they would have been better off without him… but at the age of 2 or so he died tragically. Then they had another child, who does not have Down’s Syndrome, and is now an incredibly awesome woman, who probably wouldn’t exist at all if he hadn’t died. Is it “good” that he died? Uhhh… I plead the fifth? Define “good”? But at the same time, I find it nothing but admirable how devoted they were to him.
(3) As for “ableism” as it applies to real life situations, I certainly think that in general we as a society are much better off when people in wheelchairs (along with people who are blind or deaf, or abnormally short, etc.) are as fully able to participate in as many aspects of society as is reasonably possible… both for moral/ethical reasons, and for economic reasons. That said, I think that reasonable people can disagree on what “reasonably” and “fully” mean in that context. Should public businesses generally be required to be wheelchair accessible? Should handicapped spaces generally exist? Should public restrooms generally have handicapped stalls? I think those are all good laws that make society, overall, better and more just. But I’m sure we could come up with corner-case hypotheticals where different people in this thread would disagree about what should and should not be legal, what types of policies should and should not be in place, etc. And I think the word gets overloaded when “leans forward and speaks very loudly to a person in a wheelchair, as if they’re deaf or stupid” and “does not believe that public money should be spend to install a wheelchair ramp all the way from the parking lot to a particularly famous scenic outlook in a particular national park” are both referred to as “ableist”.
Having basic things such as parking spots that don’t leave me unable to exit or enter my car, a toilet in public restrooms that i can GET TO without out crawling to on my ass or being able to physically GET TO the entrance of a building are absolutely not things reasonable people can take issue with. These are basic things that an advanced society can easily manage. “Survival of the fittest” is one of the major aspects of human life that a successful society can artificially mitigate to accommodate the most vulnerable members of that society.
I do believe there are reasonable limits as to the extent our society “accommodates” people with disabilities. I put “accommodates” in quotes because there are things that are simply unavailable to me and other disabilities people, irrespective of accessibility. I can’t participate in a foot race no matter how accessible said race is. As a disabled man who expects similar rights and agency of that of the able-bodied, I expect to only have the ability to watch the foot race in person, not to be able to participate in the race. I’m not delusional about my reality.
I’d like to think I’m not ableist.
One problem though is that that ‘disabled’ is used to cover a range of disabilities from someone deaf, or with one arm, right through to someone like Charlie Gard, who had a genetic disorder meaning his lifespan was never going to be over a few months, and brain damage so severe that he was barely alive in any meaningful way.
At some point, society kind of does have to decide that a life is not really meaningful. For me, it’s around the unresponsive, little brain activity level.
I guess that is the big different between racism and ableism; there aren’t races which it is not in a person’s own interest to exist should they be born into them, but there is an, IMO, valid argument that there are disabilities so severe that it is not in the interests of people born with them to have measures taken to extend their lives.
I don’t measure people’s worth by their value to ‘society’, people are ‘society’. Resources, at least in the First World, are not so limited that we can’t provide ramps, bigger bathroom stalls with handrails and assistance. If special needs education is taking away from the education of other kids, that’s just because resources are being managed badly.
I like to think that I’m not an abelist, but I will always admit that there is much to learn. I have friends and family with mental and physical disabilities and spending time with them helps me better understand the concepts of accessibility.
I appreciate reading what **Ambivalid **and other have to say about their struggles as a disabled person completely functioning in society, to learn how I can do better. His frustration with people who try to help too much are extremely eye-opening.
Wow, this makes me really sad. I’m not chastising you - I understand that you’re acknowledging that your reaction isn’t necessarily rational - but I do urge you to re-examine this perspective.
For starters, you’re likely thinking of paralympics (Special Olympics is specific to intellectual disabilities). The underlying philosophy to para sports is “sport-first”, and these are impressive, accomplished athletes who train hard and perform at levels well above the average able-bodied person. That you would liken strong, talented competitors accomplishing outstanding feats of athleticism to a “freak show” is hard for me to get my head around.
I would encourage you to make an effort to get over whatever “ick” you feel about seeing a body with a disability – it’s genuinely secondary to the athleticism being displayed.
How do you figure? There is some number of dollars that we as a society decide should be spent on public education. Some of them will be spent specifically on special ed. Every dollar being spent specifically on special ed is NOT being spent not-on-special-ed.
I mean, I’d hope we don’t ever come down to “well, we can install wheelchair ramps at this school, or we can have a math teacher, but we can’t do both”, but I don’t see why you don’t think that somewhat less extreme versions of that aren’t happening all the time.
And I don’t think there’s a simple, pat answer.
Wheelchair ramps to get to all the classrooms? That seems like a great idea. But, and this is purely a hypothetical, but this is the kind of thing that could come up… suppose there’s a yearly tradition at this school in which the science class goes on a nature hike in a nearby state park, which involves some steep bits and some narrow bits, totally not wheelchair accessible. What should happen? Spend a TON of taxpayer money (and totally disrupt nature) by installing a wheelchair ramp all the way along the path? Students who happen to have classmates in wheelchairs don’t get to go on this nature hike, they go on a different, presumably worse one, instead, just so the whole class gets the same experience? Or kids in wheelchairs get 99% of the same learning experience, but not 100%, and life isn’t fair?
Honestly, I don’t think there is a one-size-fits-all always-correct answer to situations like that.
I’m aware that things like that are happening, but it boggles the mind that that’s happening in such a wealthy country.
The correlation between inadequate education and a whole host of societal problems is so strong that it seems pretty obvious to me that education should be treated as more of a priority than it currently is. Both here in the UK and in the US.
Even just at the financial level, ignoring the human impact, helping a special needs kid get the life skills to be even partly self-supporting is going to be way cheaper than providing support for them for the rest of their lifetime.
Also, I’m not quite sure what the situation is over there, but I know here that there can be a lot of waste within the special ed system; it was pretty frequent when I worked in a zoo to have special ed schools round; fine, when kids were actually getting something from the experience. All to often though, we’d get whole groups of completely unresponsive kids (or worse, overwhelmed freaking out kids) with ‘carers’ who were pushing them round like so many shopping trolleys, totally ignoring them, and even shoving them out the way to get a better look at the animals I’d got out for the group. No way those kids were getting anything from that day out.
You’re right, there is no one size fits all but, to give one example, in a case of a new school being built why have stairs at all? Why not design the bathrooms in such a way that all the stalls are wheelchair accessible? IF you maintain gender based bathrooms, why not design the female washrooms to be larger so there are more stalls available as women tend to spend more time using them than men do? There are situations where that isn’t financially/physically possible but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least put some thought into what we do.
I’m probably on the ableist spectrum and most of the time I may not even think about what someone else might have to deal with on a given day. That doesn’t mean I don’t think about it at all, though. When I was younger I would try getting ready for school without opening my eyes, or try getting dressed with only one arm. Does that take away from those who have to do it as a part of their daily life? Some would say it does, but I personally believe it gave me insight and maybe a bit of empathy. We should be still treating people as people first, irrespective of why they might be different from us and that’s hard to learn.
I like to think I am not. But I never dated a woman in a wheelchair and I am not sure what I would have done had I known one. I certainly approve of society having things like chair lifts in the buses (which more than half of all Montreal buses do and the numbers are growing as older ones are retired). They are gradually installing elevators in the Metro stations but it will take over a decade to do them all and I don’t think we can afford to speed that up much. My commuter train has only two stations (the downtown and one other) that are wheelchair accessible. It would take only a minor accommodation to make the station I use accessible since it already has one street level exit, so all that would be needed would be a ramp to the center level of the lead car. But there are no plans to do so.
But Ambi’s question of dating a woman in a wheel chair leaves uneasy. Oh, I would be fine with a casual date, but I was always looking for something more than casual, at least once I was 18 or so. As I look back on 53 years of marriage I am afraid that my life would have been a lot more limited married to a woman in a wheel chair. My first question would be whether she has feeling in her pubic area. If not, screwing her would be very strange, although it is possible that she could enjoy it in other ways. But, as an example, we went off to Switzerland for 6 months on short notice with a one year old and my wife 4 months pregnant (so our son was born there). They rented us an apartment that was not wheelchair accessible. So my objections are not philosophical, but only practical. I apologize for this Ambi, but I try to be honest.
Hey, I’m not disheartened by any of the honesty in this thread, it’s honesty that I am already very well-steeped in. I find the honesty refreshing because people are only admitting things that I already know are true.
I wouldn’t rule out dating a disabled guy - I was married to a disabled guy for 30 years, after all - but I’m not going to say I’d be OK with any and all disabilities. In a marriage with an able-bodied and a disabled person involved it’s possible for the able-bodied person to go out and do things the other partner simply can’t… but that requires the “can’t” party to be OK with that, AND finding opportunities where other people aren’t going to cause problems with half of a married couple out doing things while the other half stays home. Which did come up from time to time.
Some of my best friends are disabled.
How about all those resources spent on soldiers wounded in battle? Or idiots disabled in car accidents?