Tuesday, March 8, 2022

Sharing my Crippledness

 

I’ve met tons of cripples  of every shape and size in my day. Yessir if you name a variety of cripple, no matter how obscure, I’ve probably met one.

 But the one type of cripple I've never met are those fake cripples that are allegedly going around pretending to be crippled just so they can tap into stuff like Social Security and Medicaid. If there are any people like that, there can’t be very many of them and they aren’t too smart because you won’t get rich pretending to be crippled. It violates the first rule of successful gold digging, which is to  always dig where there is gold.

Actually, I have to take that back because you can get rich by pretending to be crippled. But first you have to be a famous actor. If you’re somebody like Tom Hanks or Al Pacino or Daniel Day Lewis you can play a crippled protagonist  in a movie and everyone will say what a marvelous actor you are and there’ll be all kinds of Oscar buzz.

 But if you’re not one of those guys, trying to mooch your way onto easy street by pretending to be crippled is a stupid idea. So I don’t worry about it. It’s like worrying you’ll be gored by a unicorn.

Maybe that’s why I don’t feel all selfish about sharing my crippledness, like some cripples I know. Whenever these cripples hear about someone with something like schizophrenia proclaiming to be crippled, they scoff and call them a fraud. They don’t want to admit them into the cripple club because they think it will cheapen their own crippled stature, I guess.

I think these cripples are listening too much to the republican and neoliberal types. When they want to cut the hell out of stuff like Medicaid, they try to tell all the panicky cripples who rely on stuff like Medicaid to stay alive not to worry because it won’t hurt them one bit. Even though they’re cutting millions, the cripples who are truly deserving won’t notice any difference. Only those make a mockery of what it means to be crippled will be cut loose.

I guess they want to start a cripple civil war. They want us to believe that there’s only so much pie to go around so the more cripples there are, the less pie there’ll be for us genuine cripples who have paid our cripple dues.

But I don’t know about all that. I’ve always felt like the more people who fit the definition of crippled, the merrier. I figure the more of us there are, the more we’ll be taken seriously.

If there’s not enough pie, then make more pie. 

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