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

[akumadaimyo.livejournal.com]

I know. They wouldnt let you in or out. Later on they at least had system set up to allow people in and out like they would at a intersection. I have NO idea how the hell they didnt know this!

Its like fucking employers who dont know what they can and cannot do or say! Had a pizza plaec saying everyone had to work on a Sunday, regardless of religion or whatever. If you didn't work that day you'd be fired cause it was a insanely busy day. Bullshit. You cannot force someone to work on a religious holliday. My mother is a labor law attorney, Please give her that case. Slam. Fucking. Dunk.

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

Yep; I know there's at least one Satanist reading who can attest to this. (I sometimes wonder whether he's declared that his religion just for the holidays he gets off!)

[akumadaimyo.livejournal.com]

Would they actually honor that? I don't know if most work places would honor that with their chrisianity this and Jesus that. Does the government enforce that? It seems really unpopular. It would be like saying "My free speech was stepped on cause I'm a Nazi/KKK!" Not saying he/she is like this just saying it's unpopular. I had to explain to some idiot from Europe once that even though hate speech is unpopular IT IS freedom of speech. As long as they arent being violent or advocating violence they do have a right to have their Nazi parades and all. Its more legal shit most people dont get. Its just sad IMO.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, one thing I still haven't wrapped my head around -- and probably never will -- is the mindset that's willing to ban any book. I own several books that I consider wholly reprehensible (Mein Kampf, for instance); I keep them because in order to fight tyranny and oppression effectively it is necessary to understand the mindset which brings it about, identify the weaknesses in the arguments used to support it, and prepare convincing counter-arguments. (This is for the "soap" phase of "soap, ballot, jury, ammo", of course.)

[akumadaimyo.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I could try to understand some viewpoints like that but from what I've read in a criminal law class you DO have the right to have your Nazi parades and all that as long as you dont advcate violence and people just dont get it. I keep saying its like that saying about how "So and so was taken away in the night and I said nothing because I wasnt a so and so and in the end only I was left when they came for me." Basically if we outlaw all the unpopular thought, how long until someone outlaws your beliefs and thought process too?

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

There's a really interesting historical example (http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/strwhe.html) of this that happened right in the middle of America's heartland the year I was born: a Neo-Nazi group wanted to march in the city of Skokie, Illinois, which has a huge Jewish population. The city refused to let them march -- and the ACLU took them to court. And won.

We watched a film about it in civics class in high school.

[akumadaimyo.livejournal.com]

Fools. See it is probably in very bad taste that they choose a mostly Jewish town to do this in but they do have the right to march.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's absolutely horrible taste -- it's tacky beyond belief and there's no doubt in my mind that they chose Skokie in order to maximize the number of people they could upset, offend and frighten. But, as you point out, they certainly have the right to march: it's Constitutionally protected bad taste.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that my language was vague above -- I meant that the ACLU took the city of Skokie to court.

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

I wish the ACLU didn't think the number three came after the number one. I'm actually wondering if anyone has done any serious sociology studies (if there is any such thing really, snerk) on what effect if any hate speech laws have. Is the fact that Vlaams Blok can be declared an "illegal party" actually a good thing for Belgium, or does it have the result of making the snake in the grass better suited to its background? Sure, we're gagging Goebbels, but at what cost? Can anyone actually point me at an analysis of the effect of anti-hate speech laws on the spread, development, adoption, or surpression of radical ideas?

I mean. I know where I stand morally on this; it's dictated my career path since I was 12. But do we even have any evidence that hate speech prohibition "works"?

(Remember, the real purpose isn't to make sure that some part of the population doesn't get upset of offended -- the goal is to ensure that no socially-undesireable egregores are manifested using the collective consciousness of a part or most of a population. Mob justice, lynchings, or goose-stepping to the tune of Fascism, it's all just a matter of degrees of power, or intent. (I'm deliberately phrasing this using a different set of vocabulary and mental constructs than the legal and social-science based arguments in favor of these laws uses, but they're equivalent.) )