Sentience

Sometimes I find myself pondering a deep philosophical question: are my dogs sentient beings? It all depends on which definition of sentience you go by. The Internet, which is never wrong, defines sentience as, “capacity for sensation or feeling.” In that case, my dogs are quite sentient indeed. I know that they feel sorrow because they demonstrate it quite clearly whenever my wife leaves the house. They sit there staring at the front door and whimpering, even if she’s just going down the hall to the garbage chute. They seem to be convinced that she’s never going to return. And when she does they dance for joy. But when I apply my own definition of sentience to my dogs, it’s not so clear. Because to me, sentience means self awareness. And I think that you become self aware when you fully grasp the concept of farting. It’s that moment of true enlightenment that occurs when you realize that all God’s children fart. And because it stinks and sounds like a tuba blast it must be God’s way of providing us all with some fool-proof comic relief from the relentless stress of being alive. When you stop taking farts seriously, you feel like a great weight has been lifted off of your shoulders. Oh sure, my dogs fart a lot. Dogs fart, too. And I believe that God invented dogs so that humans would have another species on which to blame our own farts when we are too embarrassed to admit that we cut one loose. But when my dogs fart, they do so with great non-chalance. They just rip one and continue on about their business. So that means that either my dogs have an innate sentience or they don’t have a clue. Either they figured out a long time ago that farting is nothing to get all worked up about or they haven’t fully considered the concept of farting. I believe it’s the latter because dogs don’t make fart jokes and anyone who has fully considered the concept of farting would come to the conclusion pretty quickly that it is a joking matter. The ability to make fart jokes is the true mark of a sentient being. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH

An Unruly Acronym

Another reason why I don’t like to put my time and sweat into cripple campaigns that are diagnosis specific is that I fear that, sooner or later, it would make for an unruly acronym. I mean that’s what seems to be happening with LGBTQ. It seems like every time I look up, another letter has been added. I’m sure that that’s all in an effort to make sure that everyone knows that LGBTQ is a big tent that includes a lot of people. If I was LGBT or Q, I’d like to think that I would be just fine with all this fluidity. But I don’t know how I'd feel about it if cripples tried to do the same thing. Some people are really possessive of their cripple status. They fight back hard whenever anybody else attempts to declare or redefine their crippledness, as if there is only so much crippledness to go around and letting more people join the club means that they will necessarily be left with less. But I tend to think the more the merrier. I’m no math whiz but I can add. And it seems to me that the more people that you have with you the stronger you are, at least in the political sense. Make no mistake, cripples have plenty of acronyms. Like for example, you could say that I am an MD, which means that I have muscular dystrophy. But I have another friend who is also an MD but his MD is macular degeneration, which means that he is losing his eyesight. So even though we are both MDs, we are nothing like each other in terms of the physical manifestation of our crippledness. And then there are all of those people with cerebral palsy (CP) and everybody with multiple sclerosis (MS). So any acronym for cripples that would include all of us would have to have all of those letters in it, plus a whole lot more. That’s why I think I’ll keep it simple and stick with cripple. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH

Cute and Cuddly Criplets

I see this television commercial during the Christmas season every year where a bunch of criplets tell everybody who’s watching that the best present they could give them is to make a donation to the hospital that I guessed they all go to for therapy and surgery and such. When I see this commercial, I feel like shouting out to those criplets, “Hey you criplets! Speak for yourselves!” I’m not a criplet but I used to be one. I’m not sure at what age you lose that status but I believe that it’s around whatever age you hit puberty. Because when you have body hair and a deep voic, too many people in the uncrippled majority have a hard time seeing you as legitimately crippled Adult cripples are sad. It’s true that criplets are sad, too. But at least criplets have something going for them in that they are cute and cuddly as well. But when you have a deep voice and body hair, you’re not so cute and cuddly anymore. You’re just sad. But when I was about the age of those criplets on television, I was an inmate at a state owned and operated boarding school for cripples that I call the Sam Houston Institute of Technology (SHIT). And if someone would have asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I sure as hell wouldn’t have told them to just make a donation to the place. I probably would have told them that I wanted a football or something like that. Because I remember that time when I was a criplet and somebody gave me a plastic wiffle football and a plastic kicking tee. I thought it was the coolest gift anybody ever received. That’s why I feel such a strong urge to tell those criplets in that television commercial to mind their own damn business. They’re robbing their fellow criplets of the little bit of agency that they have. Suppose that they want to use their cuteness and cuddliness to try to finagle a football out of somebody? Everybody’ll think that they’re being selfish little bastards. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH

Ryan's What?

It’s important to remember that the A in AI stands for Artificial. It could also stand for Approximate when you’re talking about deaf people, I imagine. Because deaf people have been dealing with AI for some time now and it’s probably left them wondering what the hell is wrong with all of us crazy hearing people. Take, for instance, the kind of captioning that converts speech into text. I assume that that's a form of AI. But any human that did as poor of a job as that thing sometimes does would be fired. I saw a video tape of part of a play that I wrote that was performed recently. The video was captioned so that deaf people could understand what was being said. They must have used some glitchy thingamajig that converts voice to text to make the captions because, according to the captioning, one of my characters suddenly said to the others, "Are you gay?” I don’t know what line I actually wrote for her to say, but it sure as hell wasn’t, “Are you gay?” But I don’t blame any deaf person who sees that video if they wonder what the hell is wrong with me. And there was that time when I was watching a baseball game on television and one of those analysis shows came on after. I had the captioning on because I don’t know how to shut it off. One of the hosts was a former player whose name is Ryan Sweeney. And the captioning said that his name was Ryan’s Weenie. And I don’t blame any deaf person who saw that video if they wondered what the hell was wrong with that guy’s parents. But that’s how AI is. Like I said, it stands for Artificial Intelligence, which means it is an oxymoron. It cannot deduce or apply logic. It repeats what it thought it heard a human say. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH

No Place to Go

I know what it’s like to be homeless because I was once homeless myself. And I’m here to tell you that it was hell! I arrived at the check-in desk of the luxury hotel around noon and I told my name to the annoyingly cheery woman who scrutinized a computer screen on the other side of the desk. After a period of silent suspense, she flashed me a resolute thumbs up to assure me that everything was A-Ok with my reservation. She said that I would receive a text when my room was ready for occupancy. I said that I was ready to occupy my room right now but she reminded me that check-in time wasn’t until 2 p.m. That meant that I had two hours to kill. So I went to the hotel bar and ordered a drink. As I sipped my gin and tonic, I wondered if I could enjoy it while seething over the fact that I gave in to bureaucracy so easily. I should have argued more with that woman behind the desk! What kind of force to be reckoned with was I? When I had an opportunity to speak truth to power, I just accepted defeat and walked away. There was another person sitting at the other end of the bar. I figured that he must also be homeless. But he didn’t look the part. He wasn’t bedraggled at all. He was clean shaven and dressed in a well-pressed suit. He looked like a businessman. I wanted to go up to him and express my solidarity with him as a fellow homeless person. I wanted to encourage him to be proud of who he was and tell him that he didn’t have to try and pass as a housed person. But before I could make a move, he finished his drink and left. So I finished my drink, but that had only killed 30 minutes. I was staring in the ugly face of the dreadful reality that I would still be homeless for another 90 minutes. Not knowing where else to turn, I went to the hotel restaurant and ordered filet mignon, medium rare. But when my server brought it to me, it was well done! Oh well! I ate it anyway and at least that killed about 90 more minutes. I received a text informing me that my room was ready for occupancy. And when I finally got to my room, I immediately flopped down on my king bed and reflected on my period of homelessness. Like I said, it was hell! I mean, I believe that hell is a place where filet mignon is abundant, but the only way they serve it is well done! (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH

Words

Oh boy! It looks like the legislators are at it again! They’re trying to help out the cripples, whether we like it or not! A couple of state legislators in Massachusetts are trying to push through a bill that’s entitled “An Act amending certain laws relative to individuals with disabilities.” It strikes phrases such as “handicapped persons,” “disabled individuals,” “disabled American veterans,” and “mentally retarded” from state laws and replaces them with phrases such as “persons with disabilities,” “person with an intellectual or developmental disability.” And of course it has received unanimous support so far. And why not? To vote against something like that can get you pegged as a Cripple Scrooge. But voting for it gives you an opportunity to go around pretending that you love cripples while you quietly work against their best interests. Don’t get me wrong. I think language is important because it shows what we really think about certain people. If you call someone a retard because you mean it as an insult, that shows what you and people who find that funny really think of retards and cripples. It shows that you think of them as lesser-than and spewing propaganda like that provides the dehumanizing cover that is needed to justify mistreating or ignoring certain people. But all this reminds me of when the federal government passed a law that was called Rosa’s Law. Its purpose was to change federal law so that “references to mental retardation” were changed to ”references to an intellectual disability” and references to “a mentally retarded individual" were changed to references to “an individual with an intellectual disability.” And this law also passed unanimously and was signed by Barack Obama. Thus, the words mentally retarded were forever stricken from all federal documents. At the time, the feds gave money to states that had an ICF/MR operating within their borders. That stands for intermediate care facility for the mentally retarded. Those places were essentially nursing homes where they locked up cripples who needed a high level of assistance and took away their rights. They still exist in every state and they still get lots of money from the federal government to lock up cripples who need a high level of assistance and take away their rights. Only now, thanks to Rosa’s Law, the federal government calls them ICF/IDs. I bet if some legislator introduced a bill to defund those places and spend the money instead supporting people in real community settings, it wouldn’t pass unanimously. Banishing a word is one way of destigmatizing it. Or those who have been burned the most by the stigma can do the opposite and say it loud and proud as often as they can until it isn’t so dehumanizing anymore. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH

Exclusive Treatment

If you are both crippled and native American, it must really suck to be you sometimes. After all, when you hear the word exclusive, you probably get a double case of the willies. I mean, as a crippled person, I can report that that word gives me the willies. For most people, receiving exclusive treatment makes them feel special and proud. If you live in a gated community, that is an exclusive environment because you are surrounded by a fence that is supposed to keep the riff raff out so as to protect you from them. But nursing homes are the kind of exclusive environments cripples are used to. They’re supposed to keep the riff raff fenced in so as to protect everyone on the outside from them/us. And for most people, exclusive schools have names like Harvard and Yale. But the exclusive schools cripples ended up in had names like the Minnesota School for Feeble Minded and Colony for Epileptics. And native Americans were also shipped off to exclusive schools like that. The goal of all of these exclusive schools was to refine as many of these savages as possible so as to turn as many of them as possible into English-speaking white people. But at the exclusive cripple schools, they had no such goals for any of us. Even though some of these places call themselves developmental centers, the only thing that people who have lived in those places have developed is butt callouses All that we were expected to do was sit down and shut up. I guess the powers that were must have thought that we were all destined to be savages no matter how hard they tried to save us. So why bother? (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH