It often takes a debilitating injury to make some people appreciate how hard life can be for people with handicaps. There's nothing quite like acute pain, surgeries, hospital stays, slow healing, reliance on others, sometimes for very personal issues, and the sense the world (and your job) might be forgetting about you. But we clubbies have had a lifetime of experience on all these counts. We know too well about hard-to-negotiate streets and sidewalks, stairs and having to wait in line - while standing. We know about feeling the world is both passing us by, and doing its best to look the other way when we pass it by. We know about the medical establishment's propensity to see us as another object on their assembly line. We know, intimately, about our futures, because our past and present provide a pretty fair indication of tomorrow.
Going through this latest "test" with my knee, and all that entails - crutches, reliance on others, pain, medical appointments, pain (did I already say that?) and trying to get back to at least where I was before the injury, has merely highlighted all I have already had to accept in my life. But it has also shown me something else, something I also already knew (in my bones) but that I have tended to simply ignore in the realization there was little or nothing I could do to change it. I am talking about what my injury/disability reveals about other people. About their habits, their reactions, their concern, and lack thereof.
Take the simple act of crutching down a city sidewalk. Now, it's not like I am invisible - I am not small, I have an appearance of someone who could either be an evil biker, or Santa Clause (you'll have to make up your own mind when you meet me) and, oh yes - I'm walking on CRUTCHES!!!! Yet, people simply walk into me, even from behind, because I am apparently moving too slow. Or, they walk by so close they kick out one of my crutches. I will admit, it does give me the perfect excuse to humiliate them about what a poor job their parents did in raising such an oaf, but that is scant compensation when it would be so much more satisfying to have a laser installed in the crutches and just burn a hole in their legs. Sorry, I get carried away with vengeance sometime - old, bad habit.
Another thing I like is how when you go into a store, and it is clear you have NO EXTRA HANDS to carry out your purchase, you have to remind them of this fact before they "get it" that you need a bag with handles. I usually use the "I'm sorry, I had to have my other two arms amputated after they got stuck in an escalator at Macy's" gambit. It usually shakes them out of their unconscious failure to appreciate anything more than two inches from their eyes.
Now, all this does not make me want to randomly trip people to induce a long period of empathy resuscitation in a larger portion of the population, (at least not so as I'd be caught:-) but it does make me wonder exactly when the idea of common courtesy to others when in the co-mmunity or, the commonweal, as it has been known since, well, before we ceased being English and became, well, whatever it is we've become. Civility, as is all too evident, has gone out the window, especially in so-called "civil discourse." And civil empathy is fast on its heels. On mine, too.
Well, gotta hop off now. Thousands call out for anti-tripping legislation, and who am I to deny them their statistics. Heh, heh.
Going through this latest "test" with my knee, and all that entails - crutches, reliance on others, pain, medical appointments, pain (did I already say that?) and trying to get back to at least where I was before the injury, has merely highlighted all I have already had to accept in my life. But it has also shown me something else, something I also already knew (in my bones) but that I have tended to simply ignore in the realization there was little or nothing I could do to change it. I am talking about what my injury/disability reveals about other people. About their habits, their reactions, their concern, and lack thereof.
Take the simple act of crutching down a city sidewalk. Now, it's not like I am invisible - I am not small, I have an appearance of someone who could either be an evil biker, or Santa Clause (you'll have to make up your own mind when you meet me) and, oh yes - I'm walking on CRUTCHES!!!! Yet, people simply walk into me, even from behind, because I am apparently moving too slow. Or, they walk by so close they kick out one of my crutches. I will admit, it does give me the perfect excuse to humiliate them about what a poor job their parents did in raising such an oaf, but that is scant compensation when it would be so much more satisfying to have a laser installed in the crutches and just burn a hole in their legs. Sorry, I get carried away with vengeance sometime - old, bad habit.
Another thing I like is how when you go into a store, and it is clear you have NO EXTRA HANDS to carry out your purchase, you have to remind them of this fact before they "get it" that you need a bag with handles. I usually use the "I'm sorry, I had to have my other two arms amputated after they got stuck in an escalator at Macy's" gambit. It usually shakes them out of their unconscious failure to appreciate anything more than two inches from their eyes.
Now, all this does not make me want to randomly trip people to induce a long period of empathy resuscitation in a larger portion of the population, (at least not so as I'd be caught:-) but it does make me wonder exactly when the idea of common courtesy to others when in the co-mmunity or, the commonweal, as it has been known since, well, before we ceased being English and became, well, whatever it is we've become. Civility, as is all too evident, has gone out the window, especially in so-called "civil discourse." And civil empathy is fast on its heels. On mine, too.
Well, gotta hop off now. Thousands call out for anti-tripping legislation, and who am I to deny them their statistics. Heh, heh.
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