Sometimes Awareness Really Sucks

 

I watched the movie The Wizard of Oz again for the nine millionth time.

That was probably the most influential movie of my childhood, as it is for a lot of kids. It was full of things that scared the hell out of me, like tornadoes, houses falling on witches, flying monkeys and midgets, But somehow, our hero Dorothy managed to survive it all.

 But now, when I watched it as an old man, I mostly just grumbled to myself. I never realized before how inaccessible everything is in the Land of Oz.

For starters, take the yellow brick road. Those bricks just look like cobblestones painted yellow to me. And when you try to roll down a cobblestone road in a wheelchair, you  get jostled all over the place because it’s bumpy as hell. So if Dorothy was in a wheelchair, she wouldn’t be able to just merrily skip down the yellow brick road, arm in arm with a scarecrow and a lion. She’d have to move real slow and hang on for dear life.

And it sure didn’t look like The Emerald City was very accessible to me. Sure, the entrance door didn’t appear to have a step. But it didn’t have one of those cripple buttons on it either, where you push it and the door opens automatically. And there were steps all over the place inside. And I didn’t see a single ramp or elevator.

And they sure made light of head trauma. I’ve known people who have taken blows to the head and it crippled them for life. But Dorothy gets knocked out and she wakes up in a technicolor fairyland. And then she’s back in Kansas, where everything is in sepia tones, and all is well. She doesn’t even have aphasia.

I could go on and on but I believe I’ve made my point. If I’d’ve been Dorothy,  I’d’ve been screwed. I’d’ve never made it back to Kansas.

I’ll never be able to view that movie through the same innocent eyes again. It’s like my wise old grandmother used to say: Sometimes awareness really sucks.

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Morally Inconsistent

 Maybe I should be out there trying to get pregnant women to drink lots of alcohol. That way there would probably be more babies born crippled. (Author’s note: There’s a condition known as Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, where a kid is born crippled because their mother drank alcohol during pregnancy. I don’t doubt that this condition exists, but I do wonder why I’ve never met any of these kinds of cripples. Because I thought I’d met every imaginable genre of cripple. I’ve met bleeders and autistics and spastics and CPs and MSers and two kinds of MDs, muscular dystrophy and macular degeneration. So you’d think that by now I would’ve met an FAS cripple or at least somebody who knows one. Oh well, I guess I will someday.)

Or maybe I should be one of those antivaxxers that tries to get everyone to not get vaccinated otherwise they might end up with autism or with a computer chip implanted in them so that their every move can be monitored by the government and/or Bill Gates. That way diseases like polio might make a comeback, thus creating more cripples (Author’s note: I am currently an antivaxxer, but only when I see a sign at a pharmacy trying to get me to come in and get vaccinated. I always say no thanks to that because I figure that the reason they’re making a big deal about getting vaccinated is not because I really need it  but because vaccinating people must make them a lot of money. I ask my doctor what shots I really need and I get those he tells me I should get,)

It would be stupid for me to do either of those things mentioned above, but isn’t that the way for me to be morally consistent? I mean, I go around now trying to get people to see that being a cripple is nothing to be ashamed of, that we deserve to be respected and celebrated for who we are.

That’s why I hate cure campaigns. I think they usually reinforce the message that being crippled is nothing but hell and so the best thing we all can do for the poor cripples is cure them so their lives won’t be nothing but hell anymore.

But isn’t it hypocritical of me to object so strongly to efforts to get rid of all of the cripples by curing us ali but not by trying to prevent us from becoming cripples in the first place? Shouldn’t my attitude in regards to cripples be the more the merrier?  Shouldn’t I be leaving a trail of banana peels behind me everywhere I go?

But I guess that somewhere deep down inside I must know that even if prevention campaigns are 100 percent successful, there will always be cripples among us. So its okay to be morally inconsistent.

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Not a Cripple-Friendly Town

As I drifted around the grocery store that was far away from home, I kept getting dirty looks. But all I was doing was minding my own business and trying to pick up a few groceries. So I said to myself,” Damn, this sure is not a cripple-friendly town.”

I’m going to name names here because I think it’s important that the truth be told. The town I’m talking about is Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, which is a little bit north of Green Bay.

And people kept looking at me as if they deeply resented my very existence in their space. I’m not used to that because it seems to me like most people are able to maintain a tight poker face when they unexpectedly encounter a cripple. If they feel alarmed they are able to  pretend like they didn’t even notice you were there. But not these people. No sir. They made no secret of the fact that they didn’t want me there.

But maybe that’s a good thing because at least they’re being honest. In a lot of places, people are afraid to admit that cripples and crippledness make them feel uncomfortable so they put on a fake smile or act like they don’t see you. Thus, a lot of cripples have a hard time relaxing around unfamiliar verts  (which is what I call people who walk because it’s short for vertical). These cripples are always wondering if the smiles and the body language of the verts are telling the truth.

Personally, I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t care if I make a vert feel uncomfortable. Life is too short to worry about that. I figure if they don’t like me being there they can leave.

In fact, I almost shouted out something like, “If you people don’t like it, you can all shove it!” But then a woman said something to me that made me feel real stupid.  She said, “Hey, what’s that! A Bears jersey!” As she walked past me, she playfully punched my shoulder and cackled out a laugh.

I forgot that I was wearing a Chicago Bears jersey in the heart of Packer country.

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A Fate Worse Than Being Fat

 

It seems that researchers have found that a  popular weight-loss drug may cause blindness.

 Normally, that kind of news would mean curtains for the company that manufactures the drug because it might make everybody freak out and stop buying that drug. But in this case, it might not be so bad.

Because you can be blind and still be cool. Or at least that’s how I think a lot of other people think. I mean, look at Stevie Wonder. Everybody thinks Stevie Wonder is cool. And yet everybody knows Stevie Wonder is blind.

I recently saw a jazz combo performing and one of the musicians was wearing sunglasses. It was indoors. And I couldn’t tell if the guy was wearing sunglasses because he was blind or because he was cool.

So, when someone does a cost/benefit analysis of becoming skinny but maybe becoming blind in the process, they might be more inclined to take the drug anyway and run the risk of going blind.

But if taking a popular weight-loss drug could cause somebody to be crippled like me, that would probably be a different story. It would be like those dumb shits who won’t get their kids vaccinated because they heard somewhere that vaccines cause autism. Even if that was true, these people are saying that they’d rather that their kids caught something like measles or whooping cough or the plague than maybe be autistic.

If taking the popular weight-loss drug might turn a person into a crippled old man in a motorized wheelchair like me, a lot of people probably wouldn’t take the risk anyway because they don’t think that anybody can be that kind of cripple and still be cool.

They would probably consider that to be a fate worse than being fat.

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Be Careful What You Wish For

 

I noticed that the new coffee shop down the street must’ve recently installed a ramp on their front door. That really sucks because now that it’s accessible, I feel obligated to go there,

My wife and I have been bitching at them for having a step on their entrance and no ramp. My wife is in a wheelchair too. And then they went and put in a ramp and they didn’t make us sue them or anything.

 So now I feel like a poster child for that old saying: “Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.”

It’s like my deaf friends who have told me about how they bitch about public events that don’t have sign language interpretation and/or captioning to make it accessible for people like them. And then sign language and/or captioning gets added and then they feel like they have to go because if deaf people don’t show up, the people who organize the event might stop doing sign language interpretation and/or captioning. So, they have to pick their battles. If there’s a Jehovah’s Witness church service, for example, that doesn’t have sign language interpretation and/or captioning, they might not want to bitch about it.

And so now I feel like if I don’t run over to that new coffee shop right away and give them my business, they might take the ramp away and that’ll be my fault. It’s pretty stupid for me to feel that way, don’t you think?  It just goes to show that even the cripples that  bitch the most still feel guilty about it deep down inside when we speak up for ourselves. We feel we have to make up for it somehow.

 Whatever it all means, I know for sure that if a Jehovah’s Witness temple opens up around here and it doesn’t have a ramp, I won’t say a word about it.

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I am the Proverbial Tortoise

 Whenever you see a professional sports team with a wimpy name, like the Marlins, that probably means that the name is an homage to an animal that’s indigenous to and synonymous with that area. If everybody did that, we’d have a sports team called the Chicago Pigeons. And our archrivals would be the New York Rats. (It’s true that we have plenty of rats of our own here in Chicago. But those New York rats look like they don’t mess around. If their rats took on our rats in a fight to the death, I’d put my money on the New York rats. But if their rats took on our pigeons, I’d put my money on our pigeons.)

In Chicago, sooner or later, everybody engages in pigeon chasing That’s what happens when you come across a flock of pigeons who are gathered on the ground pecking on bird seed or something. Something comes over you and you just start running full speed at the flock of pigeons because you know what will happen . The pigeons will fly away all at once and that’s really cool to experience. And the pigeons always wait until the last minute to take off. It’s like they have radar that tells them not to skedaddle until they see the whites of your eyes. Quite often, when driving the streets of Chicago, you’ll see a pigeon in the middle of the road. You’re closing in on it fast and it’s still in the middle of the road and it looks like there’s no way you’re going to be able to avoid splattering a pigeon. But at the very last instant the pigeon flies away and somehow manages to escape.

It used to be that whenever I saw a flock of pigeons bustling around on the ground, I’d drive my wheelchair right into it full blast. I still do, but when I drive full blast I’m a lot slower than I used to be. Because I’ve programmed my chair so that sometimes when I go full blast I feel like I’m dragging my ass. But I do that so won’t get jostled and discombobulated all to hell when I hit a bump. The downside is that when I charge full blast into a flock of pigeons, they just walk away. I’m moving so that they don’t even have to fly away.

I am the proverbial tortoise. But sometimes the moral of the story is that slow and steady wins the race. So sometimes I get the last laugh.

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The Recognition of the Mainstream Culture

 

I must say that at first, I felt a joyous sense of historical vindication when I saw professional Cornhole being played on a national sports television network. This meant that the activity of tossing beanbags into holes for points was now being recognized as legitimate by the mainstream culture. And that meant that, by extension, cripples were also being recognized as legitimate by the mainstream culture.

Because there was a time when tossing a beanbag was something only cripples spent a lot of time doing. As a  criplet, I tossed a lot of beanbags into holes on boards, like Cornhole, or into garbage cans or whatever. I feel stupid now that I thought it was kind of fun at the time, when, in fact, it was a useless activity. It seemed destined to always be a resoundingly unmarketable skill, no matter how zealously I developed it. It was indicative of the low expectations placed on cripples.

I never dreamed that I’d see the day when tossing beanbags would be looked upon as cool enough to be covered by a national sports television network. I never dreamed that if I played my cards right, I might someday land a million-dollar beanbag endorsement deal.  I never dreamed that tossing beanbags might someday make me a chick magnet.

But then I noticed that none of the people playing Cornhole on television were crippled.  So I wondered if this was really just a matter of cultural appropriation. Because there’s a thin line between cultural appropriation and being recognized as legitimate by mainstream culture. Cultural appropriation is when the mainstream culture steals something that someone else created and pretends that they are the ones who thought it up. Why do we need the recognition of mainstream culture to feel validated? It’s like busting your ass day in and day out trying to win your father’s approval. It’s such a relief when you finally give up trying to do that and say to yourself, “Screw it. I’m cool whether he says so or not.”

That’s when my joyous sense of historical vindication went away. So now I’m thinking, “Fuck you, mainstream culture! Who needs you?

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