The Civility and Inability in a Disability

You drive into a crowded parking lot and find yourself in what seems to be the Great Barrier Reef in a slew of cars in a sea of activity on the sunny Saturday afternoon. At the mercy of 1997 Honda Civic, a little ray of sunshine peers as you see the vacancy between the two yellow lines. After what seems like years, you park your car and step outside into the day. As you step out, you are abruptly halted by a car with a little blue man on its license plate. The car turned straight in from the main road, and raced straight past all the cars in its path, and settled into a nice spot right in front of the door. The handicapped space has been taken. You think to yourself, "Wow, I'm glad people saved that spot for whatever disabled person was there."

Physical disabilty may "loom pretty large" in someone's life (Mairs 14). People in that car that parked in the space that you looked so long for actually need that special space! The effects of the disabled are everywhere: the ramps up to the building that wheelchairs desperatly need, the civility of other civilians to help hold open doors or the automatic handicapped door, or like we just mentioned, the handicapped parking space. But where do we draw the line between letting disability define the people we help and letting the people we help define their disability?

This question arises from Soyster, who simply describes growing crippled as a "bitch" experience. THe problem for him isn't "how others see him," but rather, how he has lost "vision of himself." This disability is affecting him in ways that we "temporarily abled persons" can't imagine. With the special treatment above, is this a part of why people such as Soyster are losing sight of their true self?






Is the special treatment that we are giving some of the disabled people really just drowning their true identity underneath the crippling effects of their disaility?