"My wish for 2010 is that people will understand that children with disabilities do not have a disease; children with disabilities are not looking for a cure but ACCEPTANCE........93% of people won't copy and paste this, WILL YOU be one of the 7% that does and make this your status for at least a hour?”
I saw this message on many of my friends’ pages and someone even argued saying that “Just by copying and pasting are people going to change the attitude? No offence to your friends who have already copied and pasted it, they may have done it because they are among those few people who understand that children with disabilities do not have a disease......”
My reply to that comment was: “yes! Attitudes do change with the wind. .specially by those who believe in the message and pass it on....and unfurl those soft pebbles off the hard rock...
But the page that really caught my attention was when someone commented:
“Wait a minute... I'm pretty sure that people with disabilities ARE looking for a cure... No one willingly accepts that they are disabled when there is a readily available cure out there that can make them "not disabled."
He found it difficult to accept the fact that handicap people can be accepted in this society as productive member of the society if they are allowed to perform the task to their best of their ability.
He argued that “You can’t accept someone who is disabled as a productive member of society when you still have to watch over them and make sure that they don’t fall and/or jump in whatever they need assistance. If that’s the case then there is no full acceptance, only fake acceptance that will make these disabled people feel a false sense of security of their place in society. And to be honest, if I was disabled and wanted people to treat me with respect, the same respect they treat everyone person, and you were patronizing me in this way and treating me as if I was less of a person then I would hate it. Your saying that disabled people want to be treated like everyone else.. well you can’t treat them only half way, because they still aren’t equal, and never will be. It’s all or none. I’m afraid.”
Actually I would hate it too....but that is where my point was, I meant to say that either the people are patronizing the disabled too much or ignoring them completely and both ways it hurts the differently-abled person.
Society just cannot see the talent beyond the handicap at a first glance, a differently-abled person has to prove their capability from time to time, they have to prove that they are capable of performing as perfectly as any normal person , and there is no need to sweat over them if they are able to deliver....independently....every disabled person can also be the productive member of the society, if he is allowed to follow the profession in which he excels and in which he has faith in, but the society never allows him to forget his handicap.
Every individual should be able to decide when they need to be over-protective and patronizing and when they should just accept them and let them perform to their fullest ability and in every case, acceptance in important because they are not freaks.
And he was confused as to where does one draw the line?
What gives anyone the right to tell one person that they fully capable of working on their own and another that they cannot be trusted to be on their own and must be supervised? He argued that when people say that "We wish that society would accept disabled people as being productive members of society, there isn't a special clause that states: " this only applies to people who are able to function independently, with out supervision, everyone else isn't fully accepted as fully functional and must be watched and cared for."
And he wondered as to what happens to those who don’t meet those specific criteria? Are never to be accepted as part of society and considered the useless ones who have no place in the society?
“ I know it seems harsh,’ he continued, “ but if they cannot be accepted as productive members of society then what are they? Or do we reevaluate what that criterion is so they can be accepted? But what about the people left over from that? Who are not accepted after that second evaluation of who is productive and who isn’t?
It’s an endless cycle that will never end.” he concluded
And I am left wondering whether the society will ever wear the cap of acceptance…ever……
