It was a bright sunny day! I always look forward to bright sunny days.
As many of you know, I am a C-4 quadriplegic, and like most quadriplegics, we love to feel the sun on our faces – our faces are not adversely affected by the spinal cord injury, and the sun feels wonderful on it.
So, on this bright sunny day, I was coming out of K-Mart, and I decided to sit and sun gaze as I do so often. Right outside of K-Mart, I stopped for a moment or two, looking up at the sun.
I noticed a lady in her 40s with a little boy, probably 6 or 7 years old, out of the corner of my eye. They were about 50 yards away from me. I wouldn’t have given it another thought, but I noticed the youngster pointing at me and saying something to who I assumed was his mother.
As I wondered what was being said, I noticed the lady giving him something and then telling him something while they both looked at me.
Suddenly, the young kid started to walk toward me, skipping and smiling. He skipped and smiled all the way to me.
As he got closer, I realized what was happening, so I prepared myself to receive it well. He walked up to me and handed me a dollar bill. I quickly said thank you to him but told him to tell his mom that was not needed and gave it back to him. He ran off as quickly as he came. I promptly decided to do my sun gazing in another location.
Stigma is real readers! It comes from a long history of misguided information, misbeliefs, and myths about people with all types of disabilities.
It is very often learned from movies and television, but more often passed down from generation to generation. It is learned thinking and behavior.
In my real-life story, this mother taught her son to pity people with disabilities by giving them a handout or a better way of saying it, charity.
People with disabilities are often viewed as charity objects throughout history, as seen on the old Jerry Lewis Telethons.
Think back and recall these telethons. Remember, how Jerry wheeled out the cute little, adorable kids in the oversized wheelchairs? It made you feel so sorrowful, and you felt pity for them, being thankful that your kids were healthy. So grateful that you reached for your checkbook and gave generously, just like Jerry asked — you see Jerry knew how to pull your purse’s strings.
Viewing people with disabilities of objects of charity has been around for a long time. Many say it is connected to an old law passed by King Henry VII, who stated that veterans who were disabled after the war were allowed to take to the streets with their “cap in hand,” begging for coins — hence, the word, “handicapped.”
King Henry made it legal for disabled people to beg because he didn’t believe they could hold down jobs (if you have been reading my blogs, you know this is known as Truthiness thinking or “stinking Thinking”).
People with disabilities, therefore, became known as “handicapped.” This is one reason why “handicapped people” are viewed as objects of charity and are an example of how stigma gets passed down to one generation to the next.
It is why the little kid saw me and skipped over to give me a dollar — to this day; I wonder if it would have been a $20, would I have taken it?
