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