September 13/06

This is (some of) what I learned today: well, what i learned on Sept 13, 2006

I figured I would repost this to help grease the ol' blog wheels.

Disability is ubiquitous, meaning that it is everywhere, at all times and all places).

Many feel that we as citizens under governmental rule should remain confident in the belief that medical advancement will eradicate the category of disabled/ disability.

Although from a critical disability perspective, that which I am currently studying, one would argue that: the percentage of those born with a disability is very small –

• meaning that even though some feel that genetic screening is the answer to the eradication of disability
• most disabilities are born out of impairments that occur and are acquired through the course of ones life.
• i.e. a person may fall off a ladder and injure their spine, the damage caused to their own person may mean that they are impaired, the time frame may be short or indefinite.
• also, to ensure that one does not focus solely on physical disabilities, a person who may ‘suffer’ a stroke may be affected permanently, mentally in some way that may cause their cognitive functions to function in a manner that may be somehow different than pre-stroke cognitive function.
• Disability and age, although cultural stigma may prophesize that disability affects old people only, or that with old age comes disability, this understanding may also be challenged by more recent statistics that demographically deduce that there are higher ‘rates’ of disability between the ages of 18-65, then there are in the greater than 65 range. Granted, in Canada right now there is an aging population, though one may argue that the shear volume of individuals in the first group greatly outweigh the population totals in the later group.

Another interesting point, 1981, my birth year, became known as
The International Year of Disabled Persons 1981
as declared by the U.N. http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/enable/disiydp.htm





Apparently this was also the year when, the now famous stick figure in a wheel chair became internationally disseminated. The effects have been very wide spanning. Obviously the original goal was to raise awareness, promote equality and any number of positive public projections. Another view has been that, the image has become quite ingrained into our respective cultures, meaning that disability is often only seen as or only qualified by, someone in a wheelchair- leading into disability is only physical- and also in this direction a plethora of other effects have caused a ripple effect. A major point is that due to our highly visual culture that we as subjects traverse; disability has been negatively stigmatized and has echoed through subsequent visual fields. Meaning that in the vernacular, disability is thought of firstly as a negative visual stigma, i.e. a stick figure in a wheelchair. Something to be avoided like the plague, for fear that one may ‘catch’ this horrible affliction if they are exposed to it for any period of time.