By Gary Karp
Throughout history, there have been revolutionary shifts in our understanding of the world. They didn’t always catch on quickly.
Copernicus figured out that the earth revolved around the sun. No way!
Van Gough only sold one painting in his lifetime. `
Germ theory told us that tiny, unseen things cause illness. Physicians didn’t buy it, so continued to operate in unclean settings. Somehow patients kept dying of infection.
On May 29, 1913, Igor Stravinsky’s radical modern symphony the Rites of Spring was performed in Paris. The audience rioted.
We are witnessing another revolutionary transformation that challenges the status quo and meets resistance…
Having a disability no longer precludes living a full, meaningful life.
Well, sure, you might think. There are exceptional people out there who have overcome their challenges and are living a good life.
That is exactly the big shift society needs to get its collective consciousness around. More people than ever in history are doing it. And many more could be doing it.
This limited view of disability has a long, deeply ingrained — and ugly — history.
The Bible describes disability as a punishment from God for not following the rules.
In the nineteenth century, people with disabilities were considered a burden on the community. Those with mental illness were particularly unwelcome in the public square. By 1880 there were 189 asylums in the U.S. where people with a variety of — so called — disabilities were stashed away in these horrid torture chambers.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Eugenics Movement — an effort to produce a perfect human race — preached the killing of disabled babies. People with disabilities were prevented from marrying lest they produce babies who would poison the well.
Polio epidemics spawned fundraising efforts to finance vaccine research — a good thing, of course. But they used the most tragic possible view of disability to do it. Jerry Lewis’ Labor Day Telethon was built on the scourge of dying children with muscular dystrophy research — although some muscular dystrophies are adult onset with normal lifespans.
It probably makes sense to you (from a nondisabled perspective) that it would be a very difficult way to live. What actually made it difficult was a highly inaccessible world, and the widespread belief that disability is a tragic thing — which therefore requires a heroic , exceptional individual to make a good life of it.
So many more people are doing it — and could be doing it — because of a range of essential changes.
Medical advances save lives. Premature babies survive at much earlier gestation lengths. Pharmaceuticals mitigate a range of cognitive conditions. That means more people with disabilities.
Modern wheelchairs are ultralight and easy to push, putting less strain on the body. They are custom built, personalized, and stylish, no longer coming across as medical devices.
People with limited upper body strength have far greater mobility thanks to power wheelchair technologies and specialized pressure distribution cushions. These allow them to put in a full day and pursue higher education, employment, and travel. They are having families, starting businesses, spending more money, and paying taxes!
The built environment is much more accessible. Curb ramps, elevators, parking, restrooms, and public amenities such as parks, arenas, theaters, airlines and hotels, and government buildings are open to everyone now. (Lots of work still to be done on accessible housing, though.)
Braille has been added to signage. Captioning is standard on television programming and other video content. Documents are more commonly written in simple language for those with lower intellectual capacity.
Technology has been a huge game changer. Almost anyone can drive a computer — one doesn’t need hands or vision to do it. Work is much less about physical labor, opening up employment to a wider swath of people with disabilities of all kinds. Deaf folks can communicate with anyone now.
Every college and university has a disabled student services team. Access to higher education means more people are career-oriented and fully qualified, able to contribute to the world in every domain of society.
How did all this happen? Did policy makers suddenly decide that the potential of people with disabilities was being held back? Nope. Those who are not thriving are typically disabled by external barriers, not the disability itself. People with disabilities themselves got tired of being blocked from the lives they knew were possible. So they became sophisticated — and sometimes militant — advocates. Step-by-step (pun intended) they brought about accessibility and civil rights laws, especially thanks to a Disability Rights movement that sprang up in the 1960s.
Think about it. These people who society thinks of as so tragically damaged, who need help, whose lives are difficult, who must exceed some imaginary bar of being “inspirational” have changed the world! Can you see the contradiction here?
When we say someone with a disability is “inspirational” we’re really saying that we don’t expect most people could do it. It takes an exceptional person. Meaning “the exception.” We’re saying that we don’t expect we could do it ourselves.
That sorely misses the true lesson of disability today. These people are not heroic individuals who “overcame.” They adapted, and model this universal human capacity in all of us. With an acquired disability, we go through a period of grief and coping and adapting. But most people (who get access to the resources and support it takes) come out the other side and focus on possibility, not limitation. That is far more common than we generally believe.
It seems like a massive undertaking, but it comes down to something quite simple. We’re either going to have a life, or we’re not. Ask anyone out there with a disability, and they’ll tell you that was the clear choice. Then they gained mastery on how it works, be it wheelchair skills, Sign Language, using a cane and hearing then environment, functioning with fewer limbs, and so on. It all becomes a new normal.
We just do what we gotta’ do.
It’s time for the world to take the lesson.
About Gary Karp
Gary Karp is a talented speaker and trainer, he paints an intimate picture of the real people living life on a new scale of independence and capability, in a radically changed world of greater independence and potential.
He speaks from experience. Gary’s spinal cord was injured when he fell from a tree in 1973. He was 18 years old. A wheelchair user ever since, Gary has been a direct witness to a dramatic evolution in accessibility and disability rights.