Age is not a disability. Disability knows no age.

[maradydd]

I recently learned that a disabled friend of mine, who has a connective tissue disorder and gets around with the help of various assistive devices and a service dog, has been getting hassled by neighbours who want everyone to park at one end of the street and walk home during the day when kids are playing (and have gotten a city street permit to this effect, though they're using it inappropriately -- they can't legally block residents from driving to their own homes, but they're doing it anyway.)

That alone is plenty out of line, but when my friend went to talk to her neighbours about why this wasn't going to work for her, they blew her off -- one of the reasons being "well, Mr. So-and-so is 92 and he doesn't mind."

News flash, people: being old and being disabled are not the same thing. Some old people are ridiculously healthy and spry -- my granddad was still climbing ladders to fix stuff in the garage when he was 90, and the first indication that nature wanted him to slow down was stage 4 lung cancer. (He died two months later.) Certainly there are disabilities that are more common among the elderly -- you don't see a lot of young people with Alzheimer's apart from that one poor family in Holland -- and many chronic conditions, such as polycystic kidney disease, tend to worsen over time, but being old does not mean ipso facto being disabled.

Everyone reading this will either get old or die young. Some of you will get old and never slow down; some of you will end up with osteoporosis, or arthritis, or diabetes. Perhaps the correlation between age and disability makes some people uneasy around young people who walk with canes or have motorized chairs -- perhaps it makes them think of their own inevitable mortality someday. But people who are young and disabled are disabled now, and it's inhumane to pretend that their problems don't exist.

Perhaps if we can get people to realise that disability and age aren't as causally linked as people seem to think they are, both the elderly and people like my friend won't have to put up with this kind of rudeness any more.

Comments

[patrickat.livejournal.com]

There's lawyers who specialize in this stuff, but whether one will be interested depends on how much cash they can sense in the air. I'm guessing if the properties are such that kids have no choice but to play in the street, this isn't a neighborhood where a large dollar value settlement could be won and successfully collected.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing if the properties are such that kids have no choice but to play in the street, this isn't a neighborhood where a large dollar value settlement could be won and successfully collected.

-->I don't know where Merry's friend is located, but that statement would be totally wrong in many major cities. I can very easily imagine the self-important, helicopter-parent, yupper-middle-class of certain brownstone neighborhoods in NYC doing exactly this sort of thing.

[songblaze.livejournal.com]

Nah, Patrickat has the right of it. It's a working class neighborhood.

They really don't have much choice but playing in the street, here. We've lost most of our neighborhood swimming pools to budget cuts in the city (disproportionately - almost all of ours have been closed, more than any other district of the city).

Having said that, they're definitely self-important. They have managed to avoid teaching their kids good safety practices around cars - the other day, as I was parallel parking, one darted behind my car. It just makes me cringe to think about it - these are city children, they should know this by the time they are old enough to be allowed to play outside!

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

In some circles we call this natural selection. ;)