Bully Pulpit: Cripples Not Allowed


I’m ready for a new handicap symbol. No one needs to be told that symbols can be like stereotypes — they can become confining and limiting, but what’s worse, they have amazingly long lives. So it’s time to kill the little white stick figure man-on-wheels on the blue background and stuff him in the ground. Why? The most noticeable thing about him are his wheels. It’s as if he is saying to the public: “I’m all about wheels — that and nothing more.”

But who, or what, would replace him?

Using the stick figure theme for universal ease, we could expect something like this: Perhaps a blind person stick figure man wearing big dark glasses with blacked-out lenses. Or a hearing-impaired stick figure with large, old-fashioned hearing horns in each ear. People who walk with difficulty would get a stick figure man with two classic curved-handle canes. Intellectually impaired people might accept, if we forced it on them with no choice, a stick figure man with a tiny head.

But any one of those caricatures would exclude all the others, plus leave some out, for instance, little people.

The only solution is to combine them in one figure that symbolizes all people with disabilities — except wheelchair users, of course, who have had their turn. The figure would be a very small stick figure with a tiny head, very large dark glasses, oversize hearing horns, two canes, and just so we wouldn’t leave out dyslexics or those with ADHD, a confused look on his face.

Since we’re being inclusive, maybe we should veer away from the medical model of focusing on the obvious “condition” of the disabled person and instead focus on the societal problem. And I think we can all agree that the biggest problem, speaking societally, is stupidity.

So we need a symbol to paste on the door of any person, agency or organization that treats people with disabilities like children who are incapable of making their own decisions. This would clearly identify those people or places to avoid. A stick figure with a large empty head and a brain the size of a pea might work.  Or, where outright discrimination that results in hardship for the discriminee is the norm — for instance, with legislators who vote to cut funding for home care — maybe the stick figure could have a red heart with a circle around it and a diagonal line running through the heart, signifying “heartless.”

I once heard that there are whole neighborhoods where accessible homes are the norm. The problem is, they are so widely scattered that the chance of running across one is nearly impossible. But the opposite is not a problem to find at all — entire neighborhoods, even newly constructed subdivisions — where every single house is inaccessible. Why not put signs up to identify this kind of neighborhood or building: Maybe, for purposes of universal ease, a white stick figure man-on-wheels on a blue background with a circle around him and a diagonal line running through him?


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