I've no damned idea what pity even IS
The following is in reaction to comments in the no_pity community. There is apparently some rude 4k character comment length restriction - what fun is THIS?
Anyway...
I am the Ben Sauvin Batshua wrote about in this forum earlier today. Normally not wandering into this tiny little eddie of the Internet, I apologise in advance if in ignorance the following remarks should seem contrary to this forum’s charter of which I know nothing.
Reactions towards “disability” seems to be a continuum, and they’re not so much “points” along such a continuum as segments. These reactions seem to run from open antipathy through neutrality (apathy seems more often the case than simply not taking a position), through sympathy and into the dreaded “pity” that I believe I have never experienced.
At some point in time between twenty five and thirty years ago, a friend of mine from work dragged me into a double date kind of thing with a young lady who, I’m guessing, was a Thalidomide baby - she had flippers instead of hands and feet. I believe the thinking may have been that since she and I were both “different”, maybe we’d get along rather well.
It certainly did startle me when she stuck out a flipper so we could shake hands while being introduced, but (at the time) I didn’t think anything more of it - I’d run into her before working at a McDonald’s cash register and can testify that she can flip burgers and quarters just as easily and quickly as any of the rest of us (and, if you want to know the truth, a lot more efficiently than many of us). It took only ten minutes of gabbering with her to realise that she was damned pretty, smart, funny and of very definite character.
At some point during that night, after many Cokes and games of Backgammon, when the music started getting a bit too loud and people started talking all at the same time, my buddy asked why I was being so quiet. It was at this point that the subject of my impairment came up, and what I’m guessing is the mandatory “who’s sicker” game of comparing her disability to mine. I lost that game, of course, and didn’t understand at the time why that “defeat” left me feeling (1) subhuman and (2) more than subtly resentful towards her.
Life dealt Lou a really shitty hand, so to speak, and it goes far beyond just the obviously problematic logistics of a five-fingered world when all you have to work with is basically a pinkie. Beyond the minor mysteries of how the hell she turns a key to start the car or manages to tie her own shoes or button up her own shirts (and believe this, folks: she DOES do these things), there have got to be hordes of mental and emotional midgets just waiting to say or do some unthinking, insensitive or even deliberately cruel thing to her, just to make sure she’s never allowed to forget that she’s not “normal”, not “one of us”… not HUMAN.
It’ll happen a lot more quickly to her than to myself because hearing impairment isn’t something you can SEE, whereas those flippers of hers, you just can’t help _but_ see them.
It’s true that I have both eyes, all ten fingers and toes and all the usual sizes, shapes and numbers of other standard body parts. There is nothing most folks can do that I can’t; I’m not intimidated by doors or stymied by stairs, nor do I have to read with my fingertips those funny patterns of raised bumps you never see anywhere but elevators and ATMs.
For all that, though, in my opinion, it’s WRONG to try to claim that my hearing impairment doesn’t constitute some kind of disability. For all the jobs I’ve applied for and couldn’t get for being unable to pass a hearing test, or all the times I’ve frankly lost jobs for my inability to understand people in noisy environments, well… what else WOULD you call it? It’s some organic deficit or variance that prevents me from functioning in the community as easily as other more “normal” people do. In some cases, it leaves me unable to function at all. I hate telephones, loudspeakers, television without closed-captioning, radio and going out with people to places with live entertainment.
Even now, when people are supposed to know better, I’m simply dismissed as being a moron, or approaching senility, or both.
Lou didn’t want any pity, either. This is extrapolating an awful lot from such short acquaintance, but the impression I got was that she CAN do most of the things most of the rest of us can do, even if she has to work a little harder at it, and you’re NOT going to just hold doors open or grab baggages or any of the other simple small courtesies we extend eachother as a matter of course unless you want to get your face slapped. She can stand on her own two flippers, damnit, and you’d better accord her the respect that fact demands.
I don’t think she finds herself thinking “Gee, if I’d had regular hands like anybody else, I’d be able to hold up my bag of groceries and unlock the door at the same time”. Well, maybe once or twice a decade. Being born that way, I should imagine she just sets the bag down, unlocks the door and moves on, does it, in fact, daily or every other day with no more thought anybody else would give to the process of opening a door.
What is she missing? Who knows? She might not be able to play sonatas on the piano, but that doesn’t stop her from enjoying their richness and expressiveness when somebody else does. Maybe she’ll never know the joy of ripping around the mountains on a 10 speed bike or in a stickshift sports car behind the wheel, but if she were to be of a mind, there’d be absolutely nothing to stop her from going up those mountains to enjoy a weekend of burnt wieners, singing birds and burbling mountain springs.
Pity me that I can’t hear in stereo? Go ahead; you may be right, I’ll never know that joy. It’d be better to “pity” me that I can’t engage in normal conversation in most places or circumstances, though. I can hear things in music most people can’t, because I can MAKE music. I play a piano (with far greater enjoyment than skill, alas), and have managed to squeak out a concert or two with a smallish tuba (a “baritone” or “euphonium”) and enjoyed twittering with a flute. *I* pity the poor hearing sucker who can’t even remember or carry a tune. Stereo or not, I enjoy wordless music.
Better yet, though, don’t pity me at all. I, too, can generally stand on my own two flippers, even if I usually wind up standing alone. I can enjoy a movie alone just as easily as with friends, and I’m perfectly comfortable running off to a restaurant to have a burger with nothing but a novel for company. Fridays and Saturdays and Christmasses and Thanksgivings are not times for me to dread if I’m far from home because life has taught me that you don’t die if you don’t always have people around to cling to all the time.
It often seems that life gives back something for everything it takes away, although it’s not always evident that the “giving back” is happening. I myself pity the person who’s emotionally incapacitated by not having a date on Friday night, or can’t read the directions on a box of laundry detergent from Canada because it’s all in French, or figure out from a map which exit to get off on when traveling in some other state or country. Seems to me these kinds of people spend so much time being terrified that somebody is going to think ill of them that they never take the time to have their own damn lives.
Batshua isn’t “pitying”, per se. She does a wonderful job of recognising that I have trouble with verbal communication, and while she sometimes has to be reminded that it’s not her fault when that happens, neither has she EVER suggested that I might be somehow “not HUMAN” because of that trouble. She’s never pre-emptively told me what somebody else has said unless I asked first.
She’s simply deploring that I will never know a pleasure she takes for granted. I could similarly deplore quite a few I fear she may never know.
Anyway...
I am the Ben Sauvin Batshua wrote about in this forum earlier today. Normally not wandering into this tiny little eddie of the Internet, I apologise in advance if in ignorance the following remarks should seem contrary to this forum’s charter of which I know nothing.
Reactions towards “disability” seems to be a continuum, and they’re not so much “points” along such a continuum as segments. These reactions seem to run from open antipathy through neutrality (apathy seems more often the case than simply not taking a position), through sympathy and into the dreaded “pity” that I believe I have never experienced.
At some point in time between twenty five and thirty years ago, a friend of mine from work dragged me into a double date kind of thing with a young lady who, I’m guessing, was a Thalidomide baby - she had flippers instead of hands and feet. I believe the thinking may have been that since she and I were both “different”, maybe we’d get along rather well.
It certainly did startle me when she stuck out a flipper so we could shake hands while being introduced, but (at the time) I didn’t think anything more of it - I’d run into her before working at a McDonald’s cash register and can testify that she can flip burgers and quarters just as easily and quickly as any of the rest of us (and, if you want to know the truth, a lot more efficiently than many of us). It took only ten minutes of gabbering with her to realise that she was damned pretty, smart, funny and of very definite character.
At some point during that night, after many Cokes and games of Backgammon, when the music started getting a bit too loud and people started talking all at the same time, my buddy asked why I was being so quiet. It was at this point that the subject of my impairment came up, and what I’m guessing is the mandatory “who’s sicker” game of comparing her disability to mine. I lost that game, of course, and didn’t understand at the time why that “defeat” left me feeling (1) subhuman and (2) more than subtly resentful towards her.
Life dealt Lou a really shitty hand, so to speak, and it goes far beyond just the obviously problematic logistics of a five-fingered world when all you have to work with is basically a pinkie. Beyond the minor mysteries of how the hell she turns a key to start the car or manages to tie her own shoes or button up her own shirts (and believe this, folks: she DOES do these things), there have got to be hordes of mental and emotional midgets just waiting to say or do some unthinking, insensitive or even deliberately cruel thing to her, just to make sure she’s never allowed to forget that she’s not “normal”, not “one of us”… not HUMAN.
It’ll happen a lot more quickly to her than to myself because hearing impairment isn’t something you can SEE, whereas those flippers of hers, you just can’t help _but_ see them.
It’s true that I have both eyes, all ten fingers and toes and all the usual sizes, shapes and numbers of other standard body parts. There is nothing most folks can do that I can’t; I’m not intimidated by doors or stymied by stairs, nor do I have to read with my fingertips those funny patterns of raised bumps you never see anywhere but elevators and ATMs.
For all that, though, in my opinion, it’s WRONG to try to claim that my hearing impairment doesn’t constitute some kind of disability. For all the jobs I’ve applied for and couldn’t get for being unable to pass a hearing test, or all the times I’ve frankly lost jobs for my inability to understand people in noisy environments, well… what else WOULD you call it? It’s some organic deficit or variance that prevents me from functioning in the community as easily as other more “normal” people do. In some cases, it leaves me unable to function at all. I hate telephones, loudspeakers, television without closed-captioning, radio and going out with people to places with live entertainment.
Even now, when people are supposed to know better, I’m simply dismissed as being a moron, or approaching senility, or both.
Lou didn’t want any pity, either. This is extrapolating an awful lot from such short acquaintance, but the impression I got was that she CAN do most of the things most of the rest of us can do, even if she has to work a little harder at it, and you’re NOT going to just hold doors open or grab baggages or any of the other simple small courtesies we extend eachother as a matter of course unless you want to get your face slapped. She can stand on her own two flippers, damnit, and you’d better accord her the respect that fact demands.
I don’t think she finds herself thinking “Gee, if I’d had regular hands like anybody else, I’d be able to hold up my bag of groceries and unlock the door at the same time”. Well, maybe once or twice a decade. Being born that way, I should imagine she just sets the bag down, unlocks the door and moves on, does it, in fact, daily or every other day with no more thought anybody else would give to the process of opening a door.
What is she missing? Who knows? She might not be able to play sonatas on the piano, but that doesn’t stop her from enjoying their richness and expressiveness when somebody else does. Maybe she’ll never know the joy of ripping around the mountains on a 10 speed bike or in a stickshift sports car behind the wheel, but if she were to be of a mind, there’d be absolutely nothing to stop her from going up those mountains to enjoy a weekend of burnt wieners, singing birds and burbling mountain springs.
Pity me that I can’t hear in stereo? Go ahead; you may be right, I’ll never know that joy. It’d be better to “pity” me that I can’t engage in normal conversation in most places or circumstances, though. I can hear things in music most people can’t, because I can MAKE music. I play a piano (with far greater enjoyment than skill, alas), and have managed to squeak out a concert or two with a smallish tuba (a “baritone” or “euphonium”) and enjoyed twittering with a flute. *I* pity the poor hearing sucker who can’t even remember or carry a tune. Stereo or not, I enjoy wordless music.
Better yet, though, don’t pity me at all. I, too, can generally stand on my own two flippers, even if I usually wind up standing alone. I can enjoy a movie alone just as easily as with friends, and I’m perfectly comfortable running off to a restaurant to have a burger with nothing but a novel for company. Fridays and Saturdays and Christmasses and Thanksgivings are not times for me to dread if I’m far from home because life has taught me that you don’t die if you don’t always have people around to cling to all the time.
It often seems that life gives back something for everything it takes away, although it’s not always evident that the “giving back” is happening. I myself pity the person who’s emotionally incapacitated by not having a date on Friday night, or can’t read the directions on a box of laundry detergent from Canada because it’s all in French, or figure out from a map which exit to get off on when traveling in some other state or country. Seems to me these kinds of people spend so much time being terrified that somebody is going to think ill of them that they never take the time to have their own damn lives.
Batshua isn’t “pitying”, per se. She does a wonderful job of recognising that I have trouble with verbal communication, and while she sometimes has to be reminded that it’s not her fault when that happens, neither has she EVER suggested that I might be somehow “not HUMAN” because of that trouble. She’s never pre-emptively told me what somebody else has said unless I asked first.
She’s simply deploring that I will never know a pleasure she takes for granted. I could similarly deplore quite a few I fear she may never know.