Ok, I give up. Here's what I think.
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Albert <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thursday, January 21, 1999 7:57 AM
Subject: Wheelchair bound, Wheelchair unbound
>Interestingly, some of our US colleagues seem to think the problem here
>was mentioning that Ruff is disabled, whereas in the UK the issue seems to
>be more about the negative, disabling imagery of the language.
I'm an American through and through, I have no accent whatever (unlike most
of the rest of you), and I don't really much care one way or the other
whether Ruff is identified as disabled in news reports. There are reasons
for and reasons against so identifying him, and celebrating or decrying his
identification.
But the term "wheelchair-bound" is objectionable. And _not_ because of some
"PC" hypersensitivity to nasty words. "Crippled" and "handicapped" hold no
horrors for me; I kind of like the gambling connotations of "handicapped".
But "wheelchair-bound" is factually inaccurate. It identifies a _solution_
to a problem as the _cause_ of the problem. It stigmatizes a tool, not the
problem the tool is designed to solve. And it encourages self-destructive
behavior among many disabled people -- those who can walk only with great
difficulty but would be more mobile if they used wheelchairs. Every time
some newspaper fool writes "wheelchair-bound" I imagine one more
wheelchair-MOBILE disabled person struggling with crutches, wracked with leg
pain, shunning the stigmatized wheelchair in order to fit more closely the
bigoted image the newspaper fool has of what a 'normal' person ought to look
like.
It is not a matter of cutesy speech, or of the fashionable changes in how
disadvantaged people are labelled. It is a matter of factual accuracy. You
may pity me for my paralysis (if you're dumb enough to moon over it) or for
my ugliness or my bad smelling feet. But if you pity me for my
_wheelchair_, you're wildly out of touch with reality. It's like a bird
pitying humans for having legs. Or a human pitying birds for having wings.
I happen to love my wheelchair very much. And I've never been all that
attached to my feet.
Ron
__
Ron Amundson
University of Hawaii at Hilo
Hilo, HI 96720-4091
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