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