Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Helen Keller in the Bell Tower

I saw a guy in a wheelchair working the cash register at Target. He had the official red shirt and everything. I didn’t know what to make of it. I wondered if the poor sap had been “rehabilitated.”

When cripples need a job, we enter the system of vocational rehabilitation. Rehabilitation is a cute word. It implies that we have been corrected, restored. We are recovering cripples, I guess. I was a challenging case for the rehabilitation system when I was an adolescent because my sole career goal was to be a poet. So vocational exploration events like career fairs and bring-a-cripple-to- work days just depressed me. No poets had booths at career fairs. It’s too bad my rehab counselor never arranged for me to spend a workday with a poet. Hanging around all day in a cramped and musty room in a residential hotel observing a poet smoking cigarettes to the nub, drinking whiskey and bitterly spewing conspiracy theories might have been enough to scare me straight.

Asking your rehab counselor to pay for your schooling is like asking your parents to pay for your schooling. They’re job is to douse all your idealistic notions and insist that you do something practical, something that pays the bills. The practical career options open to me in those days were pretty much to be a social worker or to be a social worker or if all else failed I could be a social worker.

Some cripples are beyond the reach of the rehabilitation system. They cannot be restored. Take Quasimodo. Back in the days when he was looking for a job they didn’t even have store greeters. Of course it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. It’s a myth that any old cripple can get a job as a store greeter. The only cripples that need apply are the ones that make shoppers feel warm inside. You can’t have bulging eyes and a hump. Can you imagine walking into Walmart and Quasimodo gets all up in your face and welcomes you?

So even if Quasimodo had a rehab counselor, it probably would have been determined that his most practical career option was to climb up into the bell tower.

Helen Keller would’ve made a lousy store greeter, too. I mean, how can a blind woman even know when customers are entering the store, unless you make them all wear a cowbell or something? And she’s deaf on top of it? Forget it! It’s way too impractical. Helen Keller’s rehab counselor probably would have sent her up into the bell tower as well. It makes sense. First off, she was already deaf so that’s a plus. And for job preparation training, all she would need would be a few climbing lessons.

I really wanted to ask the wheelchair guy working the cash register if he had been rehabilitated. Was this the job he wanted, or was this the practical default?

But I never saw him at Target again so maybe he lapsed in his rehab. Maybe he succumbed to the seductive attraction of the impractical.

10 comments:

  1. Sir - I enjoy your blog and read it regularly. but wtf here? This is absurd. My goal was to play for the Yankees, but I had to "settle" for construction. You look at a man who is working and contributing to society and "wonder if the poor sap had been rehabilitated." How dare you, sir? Many of us go to work every day in jobs like this. Was it our first choice? Of course not. But again - how dare you degrade any of us - both able-bodied, and otherwise-abled, by suggesting that our work is something people "settle" for? You dishonor all of us with posts such as this.

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    1. Anon. No degredation intended and I believe none implied. The entry simply asks if this is the job he wanted or was he forced into it.
      SAC

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    2. Excuse me but don't Voc Rehabs exist to aid all crips in becoming tax payers rather than then suckers we are? I would imagine social workers who look at the overwhelming wave of folks like us & realize how few of us do get to do what we want, as well as how dwindling a pot it is and they then choose to work harder with the pretty, happy cripples. You just have to watch a reality show like Lifetime's "Push Girls" to know how things really work. Too many of us let our crippleness be a bad thing instead of the best thing that ever happened to us! Time to channel that inner beauty queen!

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  2. This is amazing. Now what would be my 'punishment' if I sent this to my Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor? Do you think she'd send me up into the bell tower?

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  3. My Rehab Counselor got me a BA in English Education and a SPED teaching credential ... right before the economy tanked.

    You wouldn't by any chance have directions to that bell tower, would you?

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  4. I was encouraged by doctors, family and my rehab counselor to study 'accounting'. It was the worst fucking mistake of my life. I never took advice from anyone since.

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    1. Funny...when I started my job at a company, I said I would do anything but accounting. I ended up in charge of accounting for 18+ years - never really liked it either!

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  5. EXACTLY!! At 18 I walked into my first Rehabilitation meeting wanting to become a Teacher and walked out with information about ROP classes to work in Medical Billing!!! I went to one more meeting, hoping they would help me pursue my academic goals, and the counselor told me to write to Mel Gibson asking him to pay my college tuition!! LOL! I never went back =) Heaven forbid some one with Spina Bifida want to pursue a career beyond para- professional work.

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  6. When someone says "how dare you!" Do you point to the title of your blog and say "really?"

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