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]

I do not "stir shit up for the lulz". Perhaps you're projecting.

Look -- neither maradydd nor I come onto your journal or your husband's journal and leave rude comments or start pissy flamewars; could you please extend us the same courtesy? If you can't be civil, try not commenting, please? Your shit's getting old.

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

I already interact with you as little as possible. Maradydd, however, may make her own decisions about keeping my company, regardless of your bombast. If she asks me to leave, I will do so.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

I've stayed out of this argument because, well, y'all are adults and don't need me to come break up fights -- this is the real world, not recess.

I will observe, though, that enochsmiles is being honest when he says that he doesn't like the term "cripple" being applied to him. YM obviously V. (As another example, he didn't like it when I described a seizure as a "fit" to the paramedics who had to come here back in February. It's not a word I would normally use, but I was up against a language barrier and their English wasn't that great; it was still tacky, though, and I apologised when I found out that it had offended him, a day or two later.)

I suppose it's like "tranny" -- some transsexuals apply it to themselves, some get incredibly shirty when they hear it applied to anyone, even self-applied.

Meh. Language is hard.

[mycroftxxx.livejournal.com]

Can I be offended at the term "shirty"? I am a Hirsute-American, afterall.