Raising a Ruckus: Who Cares?


Allen Rucker

I was pontificating in front of a class of college students the other day, giving an impassionate dissertation on the painfully long struggle of people with disabilities for a seat at the table, any table, when I realized only four people were listening. Three were napping, a half dozen were texting on their iPhones, and the rest were just staring at me like I was speaking Chinese. The four that seemed to be listening were whacking away furiously on their laptops, appearing to be writing down every illuminating word out of my mouth. But, then again, how did I know what they were writing? I even stopped speaking a time or two to see if they would stop typing. They did, which made me feel good. Then again, I thought later, maybe they were hip to my trickery and played along accordingly.

Driving home, it occurred to me: Sure, they didn’t care, but why should they care? Unless they themselves are disabled, or their mother, or younger brother, what does disability have to do with their lives? Other “protected” classes, as they are called — blacks, Hispanics, LGBT (in some locales, anyway) and last but not least, women — have a significant group presence in society. Maybe they don’t have all the status and influence they’d like to have, but they have all exercised enough real social and political power to be taken seriously. When one out of three Americans will be Hispanic by 2050 and a gay man, Tim Cox, runs the biggest company by market value in the whole freaking world, then it makes sense for bright college kids to pay attention to Hispanics and gays. And women? Since 56 percent of all college students are women, they no doubt are interested in themselves.

But are there people with disabilities with real, game-changing power in America? One. Greg Abbott, governor of the second largest state in the union, Texas. Does he care about people with disabilities? If you take him at his word — the words “disability rights” never crossed his lips in his campaign for the governorship — the answer is not a whit. He’s the Clarence Thomas of crips, the poster boy for a whole new political category: DINO. Disabled In Name Only.

Which brings me back to the college students. If they are being asked to care about the disabled simply out of the goodness of their hearts and for the betterment of the republic, you’ve lost them. Sure they have hearts, at least some of them, and sure they care about the republic, at least in poli-sci class, but many if not most of them are looking at a huge college debt in the $20,000 to $50,000 range and 50 percent of them — real statistic — will end up in jobs like sales clerk at Banana Republic or waiter at Red Lobster. They really don’t have time to think about a whole class of people who have absolutely no immediate impact on their lives. They have to spend their non-drinking hours — both of them — on acquiring real job skills.

The solution? Since one out of four of these kids will be disabled in their lifetime, I figure they should know what they are in for. I’d make every kid in the class go through a Scared Straight program about life after disability. Instead of a day in jail, it would be a day and night in a smelly, run-down “care” facility. They’d be given clunky wheelchairs and lumpy beds, be forced to eat dog food in the shape of “Heavenly Meatloaf,” be awakened every 15 minutes at night just like they do at Guantanamo, have to listen to a roommate’s television playing nothing but “I Love Lucy” in Spanish, and occasionally be locked in a closet for insubordination.  “Don’t you get it?” one pumped-up male nurse will shout in their faces, spittle dripping, “if you don’t fight for the rights of the disabled, this is how you will end up! Forever!”

If that doesn’t work, then plan B is for all students with disabilities to get MBAs, ascend to the top of a Fortune 500 company, or at least a Banana Republic store, and make every nondisabled employee’s life miserable. That’ll teach ’em to care.


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