Harnessing the Power of the Crippled Protester

If you’ve got a hankerin’ to organize a protest march (and who doesn’t these days?), here’s a tip: recruit as many cripples as you can and put them right at the front of the line. This will go a long way toward neutralizing the cops. Trust me on this one. I’ve been to enough protests to know that some cops are terrified of cripples. They’re terrified of the optics of being seen duking it out with a bunch of cripples. I can tell that a group of cops is feeling particularly worried about this when they adopt a strategy of playing a game that I call grab-a-walkie. They move in to arrest the protesters but they walk right past the crippes and grab the nearest walkie to arrest. This is very amusing to watch because the cops act like they’re all proud of themselves because they think they’re the first ones to think up this strategy. But I’ve seen it a million times. I don’t know what the cops are hoping will happen. Maybe they figure that the only way that cripples could be doing something so uncripplelike would be that a bunch of walkies must’ve put us up to it. And maybe if they snatch the walkies away it will render the cripples rudderless and we’ll just go away without them having to arrest us. So the best way to defuse that strategy is for all of the stubborn cripples to remain steadfast in their stubbornness and tell the cops that if they want us to go away they’ll have to haul us away, too. But that doesn’t always work because some cops have such a bad case of the willies when it comes to possibly being seen hauling away cripples that it’s nearly impossible to get them to arrest us. We practically have to set their vehicles on fire before they’ll take notice of us. Therein lies the power of the crippled protester. We can be human shields because our presence often makes cops a lot more reluctant to move in quickly and try to break things up. I suppose I should be dismayed by this. If this was a more just world, cops would be just as unflinching about busting a cripple’s head as they are about bustling anybody else’s head. But they are not and that’s rooted in the type of ignorance that sees all cripples as too fragile to function in the outside world. I shouldn’t be reinforcing this oppressive silliness but I’m willing to do it as long as it’s for a good cause. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH-nvFX30Mk2fJx9uI

I'll Give You Something to Stare At

I’ve often heard people who aren’t crippled say that they think that the worst part about being crippled must be dealing with all of the ignorant people who stare at you all the time. But that’s hardly the highest level of ignorance I’ve run into in all of my years of being crippled. In fact. It was just a few years ago that I noticed a lot of people were staring at me. I was in a grocery store and a lot of people kept looking back over their shoulder in my direction at me as they passed me. Some were even laughing. But then I realized that they must've been staring at the guy who was with me who was from my pit crew. That’s what I call the people that I’ve hired to do essential things for me like help me get in and out of bed and go to the grocery store. At the time I had a guy working for me who called himself “gender nonbinary” and he went by a gender neutral name. But he was born a guy and he for sure looked like a guy. He even had a beard. Well on this particular day he showed up to work his shift with me wearing a dress. It was blue with yellow flowers all over it. And when we went to the grocery store some people kept staring at him and I thought to myself, “What's the matter? Haven’t you ever seen a guy with a beard wearing a dress before? I suppose there was a day, way back when I was but a wee criplet, when I was the object of much staring when I went out in public. In those days, a cripple like me might’ve been the freakiest thing anybody was likely to encounter in public in the course of an otherwise routine day. But since then a multitude of cripples and other freaky-looking people have broken free and are on the loose. So I no longer have the shock potential that I once had. People have a lot more interesting things to stare at nowadays, such as men with beards wearing dresses. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH-nvFX30Mk2fJx9uI

Good News for Lepers

I recently looked up leprosy to see if there ever really was such a thing. I started to wonder if maybe the infamous lepers in the Bible were as fictitious as unicorns and Big Foot. Because I have met every imaginable genre of cripple in my day, or at least I thought so. But I have never met a leper. And it turns out that there really were (and still are) lepers. They weren’t just made up by whomever wrote the Bible as a nifty literary device to symbolize uncleanliness and unGodliness. One of the sites I went to says that the word leprosy is mentioned in the Bible more than 40 times. The Center for Disease Control says that every year 250 people in the United States and 250,000 people around the world are diagnosed with leprosy. But it is now known as Hansen’s disease and it is easily treatable and curable. And 95 percent of all humans have immunity against it anyway . So that would explain why I have never met a leper. But I can see why the Bible picks on them so much. Because in those days, the best way to illustrate the harsh consequences of not being right with God was to depict those who aren’t right with God as cripples. And the best way for upright society to protect itself from them was to banish them until they either died or weren’t crippled anymore because Jesus healed them. And lepers were the closest thing to cripples to be mixing with the masses at time. Cripples like me probably just died quick in those days because everything was so damn inaccessible. Hell, the world is a helluva lot more accessible now than ever before and it’s still barely accessible enough for me to get by. So it seems that as the cripple liberation movement has advanced, the public perception of lepers has advanced along with it. Nobody can shun them anymore without feeling at least a little guilty about it. This is good news for lepers but it’s bad news for some other people. I’m talking about people who seem to have an insatiable need to find someone to shun so that they can feel better about themselves. This gives them the peace of mind of knowing that at least those that they are shunning are on a lower rung on the social ladder than they are. They feel threatened when the shunned rebel because they think that if the shunned move up the ladder then everybody else must necessarily move down and they might end up on the bottom rung. These people must be avoided as diligently as lepers were avoided in the Bible. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH-nvFX30Mk2fJx9uI

The Miracle of Farting

If it wasn’t for farts, I’d probably be a staunch atheist. Because I find the concept of God to be rather silly. And maybe that’s because I’ve always found that the people who believe in God most passionately tend to see him (always a him) as some fantasy immortal up in the sky who performs magic tricks. I can see why people believed stuff like that several centuries ago. We didn’t know much back then about the loud and scary world we live in. If thunder and lightning was all around, we didn’t know what the hell it was so we just shrugged and figured that God must be pissed off at us about something. We could only take a wild guess as to what we did to piss him off so much. But we’ve learned a lot since then about how things work. So you’d think that we’d all stop believing in God at about the same age that we stopped believing in Santa Claus. But when I contemplate the phenomenon of farting (as I often do}, suddenly I’m not so sure. Because a fart occurs when a creature with a butthole releases some of its internal sewer gas via that butthole and sometimes it makes a sound like a trumpet and sometimes it stinks. It is always inappropriate and awkward to fart in public so therefore farts are always funny. In all of the time that I have spent contemplating the phenomenon of farting, I have yet to come up with a scenario where it strikes me as sad or tragic or anything other than funny. Thus, I conclude that farts are a perfect creation in terms of their predictability and therefore God must’ve thought them up as part of her grand plan. God, in her infinite wisdom, must’ve known that living in our loud and scary world would be relentlessly stressful and we would all need some comic relief in order to get by. So she said, “Let there be farts!” It gives me a great feeling of awe. Some people feel that way when they see mountains or a sunset or a child. They think it’s too perfectly beautiful to be an accident so it must be a divine creation I feel that way about farts. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH-nvFX30Mk2fJx9uI

Boy, Was I Crippled

I was srtrolling down the sidewalk one fine summer day when I heard a voice from behind me cry out, "Hey cripple!" At first I ignored it. But then I heard it again. "Hey cripple!" So this time I turned around to see who it was. I figured if they were talking to me, they must be a good friend of mine. Because my closest friends would be the only ones who would call me that and not mean it in the wrong way. But when I turned around, I saw two guys that I never saw before . They both had shit-eating grins. And the taller one said to me, "Dude, that's the best bumper sticker I ever saw!" I figured that he must've been referring to the patch that was attached to the backpack that hung on the back of my wheelchair. i often forgot it was there. It had a blue background like those handicapped parking signs and on it, like on those signs, there was that white, stick-figure cripple in a white, stick-figure wheelchair. And this cripple was smoking a bong with the letters THC on it. And across the top of the patch, in white letters, was the word CRIPPLED. I had no idea what this all meant Maybe it was some kind of pothead slang that I'd never heard for being really super duper stoned. Like maybe something like, "Boy, was I crippled last night." I don't know. I just saw the patch in a store and I thought it was funny so I bought it and attached it to my backpack. The two guys approached me and the taller one said, "You deserve one of these." Out of the side pocket of his pants he extracted a metal one-hitter that was packed full of pot. With his other hand he flicked the wheel of his lighter until a steady flame popped up and then he held it all up to my mouth. I hesitated and looked around. After all, we were out in public in broad daylight. The taller one said to me, "What're they gonna do, throw us in jail? Fuck 'em, I'm a lawyer!" So I took a hit. And boy was I crippled! (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH-nvFX30Mk2fJx9uI

Cripples in Television Commercials

If any pharmaceutical company finds a cure or an effective treatment for that which makes me crippled and they decide that they want to make television commercials about it, I don’t think that I’ll see any cripples in those commercials. Because I recently saw a television commercial about a drug that’s supposed to help you lose weight. The target audience for a commercial like that would be fat people (or people who think they’re fat), right? But I noticed how none of the actors in the commercial who were singing and dancing about the drug were fat. But none of them were exactly in tip-top shape either. They didn’t make anybody feel intimidated by the sight of either an honest-to-God fat person or someone in tip-top shape. So it seemed to me that the casting director was looking for “transitional” actors who looked like they maybe could have been fat once but still had a ways to go before they reached their ideal weight.I guess that was their idea of their target audience–not so much people who were already fat but people who didn’t want to be fat,. It made me we wonder what the actors would look like who would be singing and dancing about a drug that was a cure or effective treatment for that which makes me crippled, I don’t think that the casting director would dare put a bunch of people who look like honest-to-God cripples in the commercial. That might run the risk of being much too intimidating, in the same way that the sudden appearance of honest-to- God fat people might be too much of a shock to the system for the average viewer. And besides, people who have that which makes me crippled usually don’t dance very well. So they’ll probably have to cast uncrippled actors in the roles of all the people who used to be crippled but are singing and dancing now. They’ll probably decide that the target audience isn’t so much people who are already crippled but people who don't want to be crippled

The Rat Patrol

I see those little black boxes (that look like they’re made out of hard plastic) strewn about on sidewalks all over the city. And they make me think of cripples. There’s one outside of my doctor’s office building, one in the parking lot of the liquor store and several around a condo complex nearby. I don't know what they are but someone told me that they’re rat traps. That makes sense to me, given how many rats there are in Chicago, although I’ve never seen a rat anywhere near one of those boxes. Maybe their rat friends have warned them to stay away. And I don’t see how those rats get into those boxes anyway. They don’t appear to have entrances. They look like tool boxes. And I don’t know what happens to the rats once they go inside. Maybe there are little guillotines inside the boxes because the rats never come out. And that’s probably why seeing those boxes makes me think about cripples. Because I figure that the company that sells these boxes must employ a lot of cripples. Normally, that would be a good thing. But in this case, maybe not so much. Because Section 14c of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act allows companies to pay certain cripples less than the minimum wage. There is no legal limit to how little those cripples can be paid. And so, the company that sells those boxes has to hire a crew of people to empty all of the dead (and maybe even decapitated) rats out of them. They probably hire cripples to do that dirty work. They probably call them the Rat Patrol and for each dead (and maybe even decapitated) rat that they turn in at the end of their shift they pay them three cents or something. That encourages competition and makes those cripples get out there and hustle up those dead rats. And, most of all, they get to experience the dignity of work. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH-nvFX30Mk2fJx9uI