T.E. Intolerance

As I read the paper Valuing Disability, Causing Disability by Elizabeth Barnes I realised that my T.E. intolerance was spoiling my appreciation of it. This has caused me trouble in the past. In a fit of despair brought on by succumbing to a comfort fit trousers, the pants of shame, I threw myself under a trolley only to be saved by a fat man much much bigger than I who had been pushed from the overpass. We bounced off each other and fell to the side of the tracks. A sniggering individual looking down on us from above shrugged his shoulders and went on his way possibly to a violin recital in the Chinese Room.

The one thing that seems true to me in the paper is the quote from a disabled person ,Laura Hershey:

I've encountered people who, neverhaving tried it, think that living life with a disability is an endless hardship. For many of us, it’s actually quite interesting, though not without its problems. And the majority of those problems result from the barriers, both physical and attitudinal, which surround us, or from the lack of decent support services. These are things that can be changed, but only if we as a society recognize them for what they are. We’ll never recognize them if we stay so focused on curing individuals of disability, rather than making changes to accommodate disability into our culture.

(Laura Hershey)