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