In Public Man, Private Woman, the late Jean Bethke Elshtain said that in classical Greece, women did not have a public role. Women “did not have speeches,” was the way she put it.
Just to be a clefted person in a mainstream social gathering is anomalous. People go months without encountering one of us. They are quite unaware of what our lives are like, never knowing if the next stranger will be the one who does a number on us - finds a way to make it clear that they think misfits like us don’t belong.
The decent ones keep us at arm’s-length, carefully avoiding any sort of serious discussion. This is aided and abetted by the lack of a mode of discourse for engaging socially with a de facto subordinate, excluded, different subpopulation.
Example: On the way to a “soup dinner” occasionally hosted by an in-law, I made the mistake of making eye contact with a scrawny middle-aged woman in a wheelchair. When the bus started moving, she began trying to open one of those one-ounce bottles of gin. She asked one or two nearby passengers for assistance, then held the bottle out to me. I smiled regretfully (I used to work for the bus company, and it is illegal to consume alcohol on the bus).
She began verbal abuse. “You are weak,” over and over. Louder: “You are weak.” The bus driver could hear. (Should I have gone over to him and said, “a passenger is violating the civil rights of a disabled person right behind you?”)
I didn’t mention it at the partially family dinner either. Instead of arousing empathy, it would more likely have been seen as politicizing the occasion.
The massive social changes, which have made public conduct emphatically less civil, which have broken numerous guardrails concerning things which are not done because they violate the understood working of a functioning public space, are making things much worse for the stigmatized disabled. What the Founders called “toleration” has eroded, until the public feels it has a right not to see or hear anything whatsoever that might make them uncomfortable. Higher education, where the founding principle once was encountering new ideas that broadened the mind, now has an ever-expanding index prohibitorum of “hurtful” terms and conceptual positions.
This goes along with a rising belief that we shouldn’t have to deal with people whose differences make us feel uncomfortable, unless they’re in a protected class and we have to.
Near the end of a quarter century in my last apartment building, I was waiting in the lobby on Christmas Day for a family member. A young woman went through the lobby a couple times on the way to the laundry room. Then the apartment manager came out. She had complained about someone who shouldn’t be there.
It didn’t end with that. Someone messed with my door lock. “You’re the one” looks on the elevator. Someone figured out how to steal bandwidth from my hotspot.
People who hadn’t been born when I moved in believed that “the community” had the right to force whoever they didn’t like out.
We, like you, are as God made us. Please don’t target us for immutable conditions that we can’t change.
Term One for a discourse of the Fighting Disabled: “Cleftphobic,” “Cleftphobia.”
