11:11pm May 10, 2014

I can’t be part of any culture that says, explicitly or otherwise, that you have to have always been perfect.

Where if they find, somewhere in your past, a statement that goes against their current ideology, then you are and forever will be a Bad Guy.

Where growth is not allowed because the possibility of imperfection at any point in time is the same as damnation, basically.

Where even minor imperfections can mark you Evil For Life, so major imperfections don’t stand a chance, no matter how much you have changed in the past, no matter how much you want to change now.

Such a culture won’t produce change, it will just produce a sort of intense policing of everything about a person.

And, I believe, secretly the people who are the most intense about policing others, are the ones who know they have the most to lose because they themselves have a lot to hide if they are to take part in such communities. Just as some of the most intense people I’ve ever seen who were rooting around trying to find people faking their disabilities, were faking or exaggerating certain things themselves. There’s a pattern there – you hide your own problem by jumping on everyone else’s problems so vigorously you hope nobody sees your own lurking there in the background.

If you want people to change, you have to allow imperfection, past and present.

If you want people to change, you have to believe that change is possible.

If you want people to change, you have to believe that even people whose transgressions are severe, can change if they care enough and try hard enough.

I know that many, many people who are not easy on others about past transgressions, nonetheless love what Dave Hingsburger has to say. I love what Dave Hingsburger has to say. Most of the time, what he has to say on disability ethics is worth a hundred academic disability-studies scholars.

He also used to write the behavior programs that resulted in skin shock on a DD woman so severe as to leave burn marks on her skin. (This was not at the JRC, the JRC is not the only place to use skin shock, this is why targeting the JRC alone won’t get rid of it.)

If he hadn’t made such a huge name for himself, many people around here, hearing that part of his history, would never give him the time of day again. Some may still not, and for that I’m sorry, because I don’t think turning away from his words will do anyone any good or make any movement purer or better. But I had to point this piece of his history out to make a point:

He shows how a person can genuinely change. He shows how a person can do something unforgivable and still look himself in the mirror every morning. He shows how you can go from doing something terrible – doing lots of terrible things on an ongoing basis – to dedicating your life to doing the right thing and atoning for what you’ve done wrong.

And because of that I feel like he’s got more relevance in his toenail than the most ideologically pure people who’ve never done anything so obviously wrong, have in their entire bodies.

And I wish people could see that it’s not just “we should forgive people who do things wrong and then change, if they’re sincere”. It’s more like “we can learn things from people who do things wrong and then genuinely change, that we can’t ever learn from people who claim to have always done everything right since they were born.”

Notes: