Disability is Great

...a dispatch from bewilderness

Disability is great. I mean, it sucks, at least in real life, as opposed to social media and animated entertainment. In real life, we’re inconvenient and annoying. But in cartoons, people like us are hilarious, especially in scenes where skulls get bashed. Think baseball bats, rifle butts, canes, and coconuts on craniums. 

Consider, too, the frying pan plus extra comedic touches like losing an arm, losing a leg, losing an arm and a leg. Dismemberment is funny, too.

There are millions of jokes about brain damage on TikTok and Google (16.7 million “brain-damaged joke” posts on TikTok alone).  There is also “brain damaged slang” which defines people like me as poorly designed and cretinous.

We became poorly redesigned when we were hit by an IED or a shotgun blast or a windshield at 40 miles per hour, or a scaffold when it collapsed. Which brings us back to entertainment, as in 63 TBI jokes “to bring a smile to your face.”

I grew up with an aunt who was blind and in a wheelchair, paralyzed by polio, and a dad who could barely walk. Disability inhabited the way we lived. “Disabled bathrooms” were bathrooms that were out of order, not bathrooms for disabled people.

Disabled people were so off the radar, we didn’t need toilets, transportation, seating, sidewalks, or doors. We didn’t eat, drink, go anywhere or require a home. We were unattractive and in the way. You turned a blind eye to people like us, or a deaf ear, or both. Or maybe you didn’t, but many people did.  They thought we didn’t notice.

A few decades after my aunt and father died, the Americans with Disabilities Act, changed public bathrooms. However, though it required that public bathrooms could now accommodate a wheelchair, it did not require sufficient space to turn the chair and leave the room.

This is still true in older buildings “grandfathered’ so they don’t need to comply. That’s a whole lot of places we can’t go. And, too, a whole lot of streets we can’t cross to not get where we can’t go. Disability is the only minority anyone can join at anytime. Fyi, according to the last U.S. Census, one out of every five of Americans has a disability.