There are times when I just
shake my head and say to myself. “Who the hell are these cripples, anyway?”
I especially feel that way
when I read cripple magazines. There are people who put out magazines where
cripples are the target audience. The ads are for cripple stuff like
wheelchairs and catheters. These magazines tend to be glossy and full of
stories about adventurous cripples who do stuff like go on safaris. There are
never stories about cripples living off Social Security and hustling hard to
get by, trying to figure out how the hell they’re going to be able to afford to
buy cripple stuff like wheelchairs and
catheters.
And it’s inevitable that
sooner or later the magazines will run a story about a cripple who couldn’t
find a wheelchair accessible place to live so they built a wheelchair
accessible house from scratch. The story recounts the whole process, from the
cripple finding and acquiring just the right plot of land to drawing up
blueprints with the architects to supervising the contractor during
construction.
And that’s when I say to
myself, “Who the hell are these cripples, anyway?” I mean, finding a wheelchair
accessible place to live is a trying quest that every cripple must eventually
embark upon. But of the zillions of cripples I’ve known, I don’t believe I’ve
met one who conquered this obstacle by building their own wheelchair accessible
house.
Who can afford to do that?
Cripples in search of a wheelchair accessible place to live usually settle for
moving into some tiny hole that’s vaguely accessible and then they try to stay
there for the rest of their lives because finding an affordable place to live
is a huge pain in the ass when you don’t have to worry about wheelchair access.
But when you do have to worry about wheelchair access, that eliminates about 90
percent of the available tiny holes from consideration.
At lot of cripples move into
places that are accidentally accessible. Like maybe there’s a building with a
tiny hole of a “garden” apartment back by the dumpster area in the alley. And
the entrance is flat not for the benefit of cripples but so that the dumpsters
can be rolled in and out. So the cripple enters and exits through the dumpster
gate. The view from their windows is of the alley.
But that’s good enough! To
the cripple it’s paradise. The cripple will stay there for the rest of their
life if they can because it sure beats
the hell out of searching for a wheelchair accessible place to live.
I never see stories like
that in those cripple magazines.
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