The Inspirational Fire Hazard

There was a guy sitting alone at a table at the public food court of the U.S. Capitol. He had gray hair and a gray beard growing wild. He wore dingy blue jeans. And when various people past, he stood and gave them an unsolicited, urgent warning about the coming insurgency and counterinsurgency. Everybody hustled by and ignored him.

Meanwhile, I sat a ways down at a table with other wheelchair cripples. And a no-nonsense food service worker, whose job title must have been enforcer, approached us making a shooing motion with her hand. “You all gonna have to move,” she said. “All these wheelchairs are a fire hazard.”

We ignored her and eventually she went away. I thought she would return with cops to taser and or pepper spray us, but she never did. Or maybe she tried but we finished our lunch and left before the cops got there.

But the whole thing illustrated for me how differently the uncrippled majority treats different types of cripples. I wondered why the cafeteria Gestapo woman didn’t tell the guy ranting about the insurgency that he, too, is a fire hazard. Because he’s crippled, just like me. He’s crippled in the sense that he’s built funny, which means he doesn’t easily fit in.

So then I realized that there’s one thing cripples like him have on cripples like me. They don’t have to put up with people calling them fire hazards. I really hate that fire hazard shit as much as I hate that inspirational shit. I bet cripples like him don’t have to put up with that shit either. I bet nobody sees him ranting and says to him, “It’s good to see you out and about today, buddy! I really admire you.”

The uncrippled majority is so fucking weird. One person’s inspiration is another person’s fire hazard. And another thing I hate is that pity shit. I’m sure the counterinsurgency guy doesn’t get any of that either. I’m sure nobody takes it upon themselves to drop a dollar in his lap. No doubt it’s a lucrative strategy for a street beggar to pretend to be physically crippled. But it probably has the opposite effect on the bottom line if a beggar pretends to be schizophrenic.


So maybe I should be jealous of that guy and cripples of his tribe. They aren’t subjected to a lot of the shit I hate most. I should want to trade places with them. But who the hell would want to do that? All in all, I’m sure cripples like them are treated way more shitty than cripples like me. The uncrippled majority feels a lot less guilty about locking their kind up for not fitting in.

So now I’m even more confused about the where I stand with the uncrippled majority and how I should feel about it. The uncrippled majority is so fucking weird.



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