6:45pm July 22, 2012

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josiahd:

youneedacat:

josiahd:

scintor:

josiahd:

Image description: A woman standing in front of a wheelchair, getting something off a shelf. Text “There has been a miracle in the alcohol isle”.

belleuosus:

Ay-mayzing!

Some people who use…

exactly. It’s not a “tough issue” as to whether to watch all disabled people for signs of scamming. It’s a very easy issue. You don’t. You only do that once someone does something that looks like scamming. And having inconsistent abilities is not that. If anything for the most part scam artists keep their abilities very consistent and try to stick within stereotypes. So standing up out of a wheelchair, defying stereotypes, is something they’d never ever do in public. And therefore it is not ever good to launch a discussion about how awful scam artists are when disabled people are reacting to a prejudiced opinion about someone standing up out of a wheelchair. This is just not the time or the place. Wheelchair users doing what most wheelchair users can do, not ever the time to start talking about how important it is to look out for scam artists. Because that only cements the link in people’s minds between standing up and scamming. And that’s bad. Really bad.

As in attitudes like “disabled people are all potential scammers” (which is what it means when people are always on the lookout whenever they see one of us as much as wiggle our toes) contribute to an uncountable number of disabled people dying or living in dire poverty. And I know how bad scammers are (for the most part) pretty terrible but the level of destruction is just not even comparable. In the UK right now this kind of prejudice (and looking for a scammer under every wheelchair is prejudice, and that’s the prejudice pictures like this act on) is contributing to a rise in hate crimes towards disabled people. And people are dying both from losing benefits over this and from suicide. Things like that have been the norm in the USA for ages. The number of disability scammers people think exist, the number governments try to claim exists, is vastly inflated over what actual statistics show. And so is the damage. Meanwhile that rhetoric is outright killing untold numbers of disabled people. So these situations are just not the place to reinforce that view unless you like contributing to the attitudes that let these things continue. (Mind you I know how bad scammers can be. I just know that the damage to actual disabled people by treating it as the norm and not the extremely rare exception, is several orders of magnitude worse. So it’s no contest. If I want to fight scammers I’ll do it away from pictures of disabled people doing perfectly normal things for disabled people to do.

Honestly I believe that anyone who wants a wheelchair for any reason should be able to use one. It’s no different from a bicycle. It shouldn’t even be a disability thing. We don’t restrict cars only to people who can’t walk a certain distance. But that’s an entirely different subject. Sort of.

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