3:26pm December 18, 2011

Across The Divide part seven

[This is Part Seven of Across The Divide, a long article I’m breaking up into sections so it’s more manageable.  Please read the parts in order so it will make sense. Here are the links to the other parts:   Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven (you are here), Part Eight.]

If I removed the other people involved, there would still be specific things I could not do.  I would still have trouble saying and doing and understanding specific things at specific times.  And that is where most people stop thinking. They don’t think of the fact that I’d have other forms of communication open to me, not all of them even requiring my cooperation. That people could, if not guess my words, at least understand a large chunk of my basic experiences.

They don’t think of the fact that in a society where people like me were truly valued to begin with, I would have been raised from birth with different expectations of the world and different training in how to use my stronger abilities.  And that I would be raised around a large number of people where mutual understanding was possible and frequent.  And that taken as a whole this would not just significantly enhance the strengths I already had and their ability to make up for the difficulties.  It would do a lot of other things.

It would mean that I wouldn’t grow up with the expectation that I ought to have certain abilities. Therefore wouldn’t grow up pitting myself so strongly against my inability to do certain things. Therefore wouldn’t be constantly frustrated by it.

If I was indeed frustrated by it to any significant degree after those changes, the way such frustration played out would not even close to resemble the way it does today.  This is the spot where even most disabled people have a failure of imagination, if the above didn’t manage to trip them up.  In every society I have ever heard of, the dominant people – those considered nondisabled – teach each other from birth how to deal with their most common limitations.  They consider these limitations part of the human condition. As they are part of the human condition, two things happen:  They learn how to be less frustrated with these limitations. And they learn very sophisticated skills in how to manage any remaining frustrations. The society in question has all kinds of support structures built into it to lessen and manage the emotional impact of even the worst limitations that everyone’s assumed to have.  So you do get a few people who by temperament are more inclined to take such frustrations to heart, but on the whole, people learn to live through such frustrations in the least damaging ways possible.

And that is why people whose imagination fails at that point are wrong. In a significantly less biased society, all frustrations stemming from any form of human limitations would be considered part of the human condition. Everyone would be prepared to both lessen those frustrations and lessen the impact of any remaining frustrations. So every form of frustration and pain would be both transformed and lessened in ways that most people in any modern basically-ableist society are simply not able to predict or understand.(*****)

This isn’t abstract theory to me.  My family has practically no nondisabled people in it.  I’ve written an article called The Bones My Family Gave Me about some of the differences that created between us and mainstream culture.  It also created differences in expectations about the world.  I can look around me and see how those cultural differences in expectation have shaped my lived experience of pain and disability-related frustration differently than most people around me with equivalent or even lesser sources of pain and frustration.  And that’s a much smaller difference in expectation than would exist in a society where disabled people were significantly less oppressed. The article Quality of Life, Disability, and Hedonic Psychology (PDF), while containing language that’s hard to slog through, deals with some of the ways that even within mainstream society expectations about disability influence our happiness with our situations.  The differing expectations that I envision existing in a better society carry things even further in the same direction.

(*****) Note that while people who say that their current disability-related experiences of discomfort, pain, and frustration are How It Has To Be In All Possible Societies are really not understanding this… frankly neither are most people who refuse to even think about the issue.  There are lots of disability rights activists whose idea of what a non-ableist society would look like simply does not consider these experiences at all because it would be inconvenient. These people deal with the exact same failure of imagination by simply refusing to imagine at all.  Then they trot out the most simplistic ideas of what access means and leave it at that, imagining that it’s all easy and simple.  I completely understand why this bothers the crap out of a lot of people, I just don’t agree with the way most people bothered by this go on to talk about it. Because I think these are things that can change, if not completely, at least in major enough ways to work on creating the changes instead of assuming they wouldn’t exist.

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