Unpublished Remarks from a Disabled Person on the West Coast, Part 1

Another six months of Monica, have mercy; I don't care if it harelips the Governor. - Molly Ivins, Time.com

Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity - Erving Goffman

There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities. - Assistant City Prosecutor Jennifer Fitsimmons

Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, ... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul - Walt Whitman, Preface to first edition of Leaves of Grass

To be decent, every person has to make their own ethical decisions. . . . If you are conformist, you almost certainly violate universal ethical standards of decency.

The following were conveyed to the authors of this blog by one of the stigmatized disabled:

Transit Route 359 from downtown past one of the city's lake parks, in the Year of Our Lord 2006, uses 60-ft New Flyer hi-floor coaches which have long seats facing each other at the front. I like these seats, and as I sit in one of them one spring afternoon, relaxed, anticipating the view of the canal and the coastal mountains when the route crosses the bridge, I commit the error of an unguarded glance at a woman directly across from me. She is looking straight at me with a grim, angry expression, so that I almost recoil. You should be ashamed, it seems to say.

 Although she has caught me by surprise, I am not actually surprised; and though in a sense I understand what is happening, in another sense I never quite do understand these incidents. She probably wouldn't look at a minority that way, or for that matter a person in a wheelchair. The era when help wanted ads contained phrases such as "No colored," or "No handicaps need apply" has passed. But as for us--for my kind--it's as if the civil rights revolution has never happened.

 It is a few months earlier. A passenger waiting on a bench at a downtown bus stop is looking fixedly at a spot a couple of inches below my eyes. A few minutes later I glance back. Her gaze is still locked. Now I face her: sometimes this will cause such people to realize what they are doing, and they will look away. But not this time.

   I sometimes think that we are the symbolic people. Sociologists have studied us, and the philosophers have mentioned us in their remarks about the human condition; Shakespeare refers to us by our familiar epithet, but with his usual charity, in "King Lear" ("This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet. He begins at curfew, and walks till the first cock. He gives the web and the pin, squints the eye, and makes the harelip; mildews the white wheat, and hurts the poor creature of earth.") and in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" ("And the blots of Nature's hand Shall not in their issue stand; Never mole, hare lip, nor scar, Nor mark prodigious, such as are Despised in nativity, Shall upon their children be"). We are similarly mentioned, but unkindly, in the movie "Casino," in an article by the "liberal" columnist Molly Ivins at time.com, and Mark Twain makes cruel sport of us in Huckleberry Finn. ("Mary Jane's nineteen, Susan's fifteen, and Joanna's about fourteen--that's the one that gives herself to good works and has a hare-lip.")
   It is some years back. I'm waiting by an elevator at City Hall, where I work for the City. Someone from another department points at me and says something to a waiting minority, whose eyes widen in shock as she looks at me. He repeats it, louder this time, so I can hear it. "Harelip," he says. "Harelip."