Just for a second, imagine you're walking down the street or in the mall or sitting in the library and you happen to see someone with a visible disability. What would your gut reaction be? Honestly?
If I were to be completely honest with myself, I'd say my initial reaction would be curiosity. Not really the morbid kind. More like the pitying kind. I'd probably think "Oh God, it must suck to be that way". I'm not in the least bit proud of that. But isn't that sort of human nature? To judge others? To think, "they're not like me, they're not what society says is normal, so it must suck to be them"...?
I just finished reading this extremely spellbinding, heart-wrenching and thought-provoking feature article called The Boy in the Moon by a Canadian journalist named Ian Brown. Brown has a son, Walker, who has cardio-facio-cutaneous (CFC) syndrome.
It's true that whenever I see someone with a disability, I always think about how hard it must be for them to live like that or how difficult it must be for their family to look after them. But never is it my initial reaction to think that despite their disability, they are ultimately a person whose life has just as much, if not more value, to their loved ones and the to wider world than my own.
It's a harsh reality, to think as a society we are so hung up on putting those who are different from the "norm" on a lower rung on the humanity scale. The fact of the matter is, they are people too. Not to be pitied, not to be stared at with morbid fascination, but people who are valuable to society in order to create a little more humility and a little more faith in the world...
