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

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

This is actually the first time anyone's called me a cripple, and given that it's coming from a woman who seems to go out of her way to be actively hostile to me/maradydd, it was hard not to take offense. I foolishly thought that a polite note saying that she was being offensive would maybe get her to realize that not everyone who is disabled thinks of themselves as "a [noun meaning disabled person]." The "a cripple who is a law student" comment would piss me the hell off if it were applied to me. I'm a PhD candidate, I'm a top-tier software architect, I'm a biochemist, I'm an author, etc. "Cripple" doesn't enter my list of nouns to describe myself, so having someone else (disabled or not) apply that to me, and then act like I'm out of line for pointing out that it offends me, makes me stabby. You don't mind it; that's cool. She self-applies it; that's cool. Applying it to me isn't, especially after I have said that I find it offensive.
I would be damn surprised, though, if Person A called Person B a "nigger" and then expected the "You think that's offensive? Well, I'm Black and I call myself that all the time and so do my other black friends, so it's your problem if you're offended" argument to fly, to run with that analogy. But sadly, that's typical of a certain type of SFBA attitude toward personal responsibility. (I don't know if you had to deal with this sort of person down in SoCal, but you've been in Philly long enough to see where *I* come from.)

You were a law student before you got sick, and you're still a law student first in my book.

(Note there's at least three other people who are good friends of maradydd's or mine who have varying degrees of disabilities reading this too, so I'm speaking up on behalf of anyone else who was offended but doesn't want to rock the boat. It may not be apparent, but I always ask maradydd if I can smack a bitch before doing so on her LJ. I'm just glad this is over text; anyone calls me a cripple to my face I'm going to have to fight the impulse to brain them with my cane; I don't give a shit if they think we've got some common "reclaiming of terms" bullshit going on and are "cripples" themselves. Fuck that.

But, all that aside, I'm glad you weren't offended, since I don't like to see my friends offended.

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

Just for the record, let me make it clear that I don't actually agree that "cripple" is as inherently offensive as "nigger"; I'm saying that insofar as there's any in-group/out-group differences, that's the relative comparison I would make. "Cripple" has been used as a term of oppression, and yes, people have been put to death for the crime of being "cripples", but I think "nigger" wins at being the more hate-associated by a long margin. But if someone called me a "cripple mick" and I took 1/5th as much offense to the "cripple" as I did to the "mick" I'd still be taking considerable offense. (And no, for some reason "mick" doesn't strike me as being as inherently offensive as "nigger" either.) Are there any "cripple-mick-niggers" reading who can offer a personal subjective comparison of offensiveness of the components of that slur?

On this comparison, though, how would you expect an African American reading his wife's blog and seeing someone (even setting aside the history this person has of being disrespectful to both the him and his wife) refer to his wife as "a nigger's wife" to react? Even if the person who were saying that was of the same ethnicity?

Dealing with a disability in a relationship is hard, whether it's your disablity or your partner's. maradydd has had to deal with at least as much of the social consequences of my being disabled as I have, and having been on both sides of the caregiver experience, I really can't say which is the more difficult ordeal. So *of course* she's going to care about, and be painfully aware of, this sort of issue. But that said, maradydd likely would have posted this even if she didn't have to deal with disability in her marriage; one of her friends suffered an injustice of the ignorant majority, and she is using her journal as a pulpit. This isn't uncommon, and I'm pretty damn sure that she didn't say what she said about Prop 8 because she's bisexual and might some day benefit from gay marriage leading to gender-agnostic multiple-parner marriages being legalized; she wrote about the issues because they involve fellow humans being treated unfairly and the unfair treatment persisting because of
the tyranny of the majority and/or social ignorance. That's the real problem, that's the real evil, and that's what we need to be vigilant for, whether the form it takes affects us/our partners/our friends,, or not. One of the things I love most about my wife is that she's just as passionate about the rights of minority groups that she has no vested interest in as she is in the ones that ecompass her or her loved ones.

[songblaze.livejournal.com]

You're right, crip vs n-word...crip is not as offensive. I was looking for that in group/out group distinction and that was the word that occurred to me.

Mea culpa. I should not have made that comparison.