Well that is where we differ. Deaf are proud to be deaf, blind have a bonding positive to blindness and mobility impaired are imbued with disability pride. So everything else you have written here I would disagree with.
The whole point is not to be defined as less than or not whole or any of those other presumptions. Read The Ragged Edge, Mouth: the voice of disability rights. You will see we really don't view things in the way you lay this out.
We are "disabled" by society not by impairment. You are stuck it seems in the old welfare policy model of thinking of disability. We have moved on to disablism. Marta
>but is a insult to those who can see, speak, hear, and think, but
>choose not to.
>
>If there there's an implicit negative cast to language that
>describes disabilities, surely that is a result of the fact that
>disabilities are disabling. You can fight for the civil rights of
>people who are disabled; you can point out that the disabled are
>further punished with loss of access to social space, functions,
>work, play, but I do not see how you can argue against the real loss
>that accompanies a disability...no matter how supportive a social
>group is of its disabled members.
>
>If this were not the case, on what basis would a worker who became
>disabled at work be able to claim compensation for injury? If this
>were not the case, why do we sit white-knuckled at home when the
>teenager heads out with the car at night? Do we say to ourselves
>"Oh, it doesn't matter if the car flips over and he winds up in a
>wheelchair because think of the rich spiritual life he'll have as a
>result"? We don't say that. We accept it if it happens, but we don't
>wish for it and we are not indifferent to the outcome.
>
>I was disfigured for the first fifteen years of my life as a result
>of putting a live wire (220 volts) in my mouth when I was a year
>old. I was treated as a freak by children in three different
>countries (we moved around a lot) and I learned a lot from that. But
>there are other ways to learn or understand such things. There's
>always the emphatic imagination; that works too. All in all, given a
>choice between those first fifteen years of misery and a normal
>childhood, I would have preferred a normal childhood. At any rate,
>if someone were to call our fearless leader a moron, I would not
>interpret this to be a judgement of anyone else but the fearless
>leader.
>
>We all wish to be whole--in every way there is to be whole. I don't
>see how we can have a language that is unfaithful to that wish and I
>don't see how the application of a disability metaphor to those that
>actually have choice over their blindness or silence can be
>interpreted as an insult to those that don't.
>
>Joanna
-- Marta Russell Los Angeles, CA http://www.disweb.org