Except that in a disabling society it is necessary to assert pride in the face of prejudice. A nondisabled person does not need to do that to preserve a rightful place in society.
>
>
>>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.
>
>I don't think I mentioned the word welfare; I spoke of civil rights,
>which include the right to participate in society and which require
>the social body to support those who cannot participate fully
>without such support.
No you did not mention it, but you implied that the medical model is the preferred model by your commitment that being "normal" is preferred. The welfare model is based on the medical model.
>
>I don't know what "disablism" is. I know that instinctively I
>protect myself from deafening noises, blinding lights, and falls.
>Those reactions are not socially constructed; they are autonomic
>responses to a threat posed to my physical functioning.
You wrote: "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."
A "normal" childhood is non existant.
If the society had not made you to feel different ie "treated you as a freak", you would *not* have been different. You internalized what others projected onto you. Black children used to do that too before the days of black pride. Black pride is taught in early education to dispell the majority culture's racism. Children with all kinds of impairments have such experiences as yours, why not make a more open accepting society? We adult crips are busily trying to dispell the myth that there is nothing worse than having an impairment so that one day these children do not experience what you experienced.
I know someone who was "disfigured" severely who is a comic in San Francisco and a damn good one too. Can the imagination wrap around that one? A disfigured man wanting to be on stage, to be seen by hundreds and hundreds of other people and he is joyous in his humor?
Disablism, in one respect, is the idea that society will not accept you if you are disfigured so you must be corrected or cured in order to be OK.
marta
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