Raising a Ruckus: The Coming Deluge


Allen Rucker

I wake up every morning with the same troublesome question rolling around in my fervid brain: Are Americans with disabilities making progress or sliding backwards? In other words, is the disability glass half-full or half-empty? It’s perplexing. Case in point: A wheelchair user gets elected governor of Texas. Half-full! The same guy doesn’t give a hoot about people with disabilities and wouldn’t lift a finger to help them. Half-empty. Or another: Last year there were 11 regular disabled characters on network television, up from seven the year before. Half-full! If one show gets canceled, the number falls to six. Half-empty.

You get the point. It’s hard to pin this stuff down. For every advancement, there is a contrary decline. If you disregard the sordid past and just look to the future, you still don’t know what to think. In the future, there will be more wheelchair users who are better educated, healthier, and wiser in all ways. But also in the future, Ron Paul could be the president and he is on record favoring the complete abolishment of the ADA. Yikes. We are clearly in the murky terrain between unabashed success and a return to the backwaters — and nursing homes — of history.

Call me a dreamer, but I’m on the half-full side of the fence, so I am always on the lookout for anything that might promise a better future for the disabled. If I see a wheelchair user in a beer commercial, I say to myself, “Wow, this is real progress. We can become fat-gut alcoholics, too!” When I read in the paper that a wheelchair user robbed the local AM-PM and got almost four blocks before they caught him, I say, “Wow, if we are bold enough to rob a convenience store, what’s next? The MGM Grand?” People will not see us as second-class citizens if they know we drink beer and rob stores. That makes us just like them!

But those are small potatoes compared to what’s just around the corner. I think it is something that might get that glass three-quarters full. And that is: We will all soon be old people! If there is a baby boomer turning 50 every seven seconds, that means a baby boomer in a wheelchair is turning 50 right now. Not to mention all the people who become disabled after the age of 60, which is why Wal-Mart keeps expanding that fleet of scooters in the front of their stores. Plus, because of advances in medicine and clinical care, wheelchair users are living a lot longer. Nowadays, we almost have as good a chance of living to 90 or beyond as any other bloated American.

The reason getting older for people with disabilities is a game changer is simple: Geezers vote! The percentages are staggering. Of the number of old people, on average, who can vote, over 70 percent do vote. No other age group can match them; young people apparently don’t care. In this last midterm election, only a paltry 36 percent of all voters bothered to vote, and of those 36 percent, how many were old people? One out of four! So, to review: First, old people are becoming a bigger piece of the American pie — one in five will be 65 or older by 2030; second, 70 percent of them vote in every election; and third, a huge chunk of them will be disabled. You do the math.

If you’re an old person in a wheelchair, what are you going to vote for? More stuff for old people in wheelchairs! Universal free afternoon movies, guaranteed paid jobs as greeters in every chain store in America, free bus trips to Vegas to lose your grandkid’s trust fund. Or anything else you want. Better looking home care workers, better tasting early bird specials, you name it. As someone says every voting cycle, “If you don’t vote, you don’t count.” The older disabled bloc will vote for sure and count for a lot. Candidates will fake an injury so they can wheel around to old voters and look at them eye to eye. We’ll be as catered to by pols as the one percenters who buy every election.

So, stay healthy, do crossword puzzles to keep your mind sharp, read the New York Times free down at the library, and get ready to run the country. The coming deluge of disabled voters is upon us!


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