Sentience

Sometimes I find myself pondering a deep philosophical question: are my dogs sentient beings? It all depends on which definition of sentience you go by. The Internet, which is never wrong, defines sentience as, “capacity for sensation or feeling.” In that case, my dogs are quite sentient indeed. I know that they feel sorrow because they demonstrate it quite clearly whenever my wife leaves the house. They sit there staring at the front door and whimpering, even if she’s just going down the hall to the garbage chute. They seem to be convinced that she’s never going to return. And when she does they dance for joy. But when I apply my own definition of sentience to my dogs, it’s not so clear. Because to me, sentience means self awareness. And I think that you become self aware when you fully grasp the concept of farting. It’s that moment of true enlightenment that occurs when you realize that all God’s children fart. And because it stinks and sounds like a tuba blast it must be God’s way of providing us all with some fool-proof comic relief from the relentless stress of being alive. When you stop taking farts seriously, you feel like a great weight has been lifted off of your shoulders. Oh sure, my dogs fart a lot. Dogs fart, too. And I believe that God invented dogs so that humans would have another species on which to blame our own farts when we are too embarrassed to admit that we cut one loose. But when my dogs fart, they do so with great non-chalance. They just rip one and continue on about their business. So that means that either my dogs have an innate sentience or they don’t have a clue. Either they figured out a long time ago that farting is nothing to get all worked up about or they haven’t fully considered the concept of farting. I believe it’s the latter because dogs don’t make fart jokes and anyone who has fully considered the concept of farting would come to the conclusion pretty quickly that it is a joking matter. The ability to make fart jokes is the true mark of a sentient being. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH

An Unruly Acronym

Another reason why I don’t like to put my time and sweat into cripple campaigns that are diagnosis specific is that I fear that, sooner or later, it would make for an unruly acronym. I mean that’s what seems to be happening with LGBTQ. It seems like every time I look up, another letter has been added. I’m sure that that’s all in an effort to make sure that everyone knows that LGBTQ is a big tent that includes a lot of people. If I was LGBT or Q, I’d like to think that I would be just fine with all this fluidity. But I don’t know how I'd feel about it if cripples tried to do the same thing. Some people are really possessive of their cripple status. They fight back hard whenever anybody else attempts to declare or redefine their crippledness, as if there is only so much crippledness to go around and letting more people join the club means that they will necessarily be left with less. But I tend to think the more the merrier. I’m no math whiz but I can add. And it seems to me that the more people that you have with you the stronger you are, at least in the political sense. Make no mistake, cripples have plenty of acronyms. Like for example, you could say that I am an MD, which means that I have muscular dystrophy. But I have another friend who is also an MD but his MD is macular degeneration, which means that he is losing his eyesight. So even though we are both MDs, we are nothing like each other in terms of the physical manifestation of our crippledness. And then there are all of those people with cerebral palsy (CP) and everybody with multiple sclerosis (MS). So any acronym for cripples that would include all of us would have to have all of those letters in it, plus a whole lot more. That’s why I think I’ll keep it simple and stick with cripple. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH