Never Walked In High Heels

“What  kind of kooks would claim equality as a birthright? I mean the idea’s insane. Can anybody in this classroom, in 2000 give me any absolute proof that the man who wanted to wash my windshield for a buck this morning and Bill Gates have an equal chance in life? Anybody?” The teacher was already passionately walking around in circles and raising his voice. “You can’t do it, just look at the world.”

People who pass me on the street tend to see what I can’t do when really, they don’t know the half of what I can do. The idea that God made all men equal is great in theory, but hard to believe in practice, particularly at first glances of other people’s conditions. We live in a world, I came to find out later, where most people will define you by what your abilities are not, not what they are. Oddly enough, this way of defining humanity is precisely what splinters people so that we question the meaning of “all men.” By categorizing everyone so that “we are all different” there is no longer a solitary unit of mankind. If there was, nobody would question what was meant by “all men” in the first place. Thus we do not allow Jefferson’s ideal to be fully accomplished.

“I’m still waiting for someone to tell me what ‘all men’ means,” he says after a brief tangent about the Civil War. “Did the constitution change when we freed the slaves? Don’t think you are getting out of  here without answering the question. I don’t care if the bell does ring.”

I realize now, that my so called “America” ends with the first unramped sidewalk  I come across, regardless of what the law says. Certain doors, both metaphorically and physically, remain impossible to open and you can recite what lawmakers say until you are blue in the face, it doesn’t mean anything. If America is a place where people are “endowed by their creator to certain unalienable rights,” then you don’t realize how small America actually is when your are sitting in your high school U.S. History class in your wheelchair. You can’t know that, because all the same teachers see you everyday, they know you for you, meaning that there is nothing to prove, and every day you open every door, even if it means asking a janitor, in Spanish, how to unlock it. Then when you get through the graduation line and out into the public you’re shocked by how many variable friction door handles there are which, of course, you can’t hold onto, how many huge cracks there are in public sidewalks from endless cycles of ice freezing and melting, and how many oblivious people there are out there who don’t listen and can’t stand the thought of either themselves or me being independent . Outside of a classroom, American progress rarely goes in a straight line.

Jefferson’s promise was scrawled across the board in half dead dry erase marker. Circled were the words all men. Our first day back for junior year of high school, the man in a sports coat at the front wasted no time in making us think. He demanded to know,  who was classified under the term “all men?” Did that include women, minorities, every age, creed? What about the fact that when these men wrote the Constitution, they clearly didn’t mean slaves, or women, or for that matter any white male who didn’t have the good fortune to own land? I looked out of the window at the rain pelting down, as it did every August to discourage us from even wanting to be outside. Summer was, without a doubt, over.

I didn’t know it then, but that was the first time I realized that I was entitled to certain rights, even if society refused to grant them.

Speed ahead six years and I’m in the so called “real world”. And I have discovered that certain bus drivers refuse to let me on their buses, in public there is a very vocal, albeit small, amount of people who don’t think I’m educated enough to go shopping on my own, and I am constantly plagued by experts telling me that they know more about my life than I do. A concerned teacher is continuously calling me and insisting, not suggesting, that I move out of my newly unpacked flat on the fourteenth floor of a high rise I love and into one that’s on the ground floor for “health and safety reasons.” When I try to tell her that I couldn’t find a ground floor flat which suited my needs, she told me I “don’t know how to go about looking properly.”

At twenty three, I’m wondering how to go about declaring my independence from the people out there who can’t stand the thought of me being independent.

Being a disabled woman these day is like living in your own private American Revolution without the petticoats and bayonets. It means starting from square one and having to convince every person you meet that you are, indeed intelligent, capable of making your own decisions, and deserving of being listened to. It means finding subtle ways to display your capacities. There are numerous daily examples of this. Calling a waitress by their name on the tag alludes to the fact you can read. You bring up current events and dare to debate where disagreement is uncommon (citing your sources of course). And if you can see from the onset that a person is going to be over bearing, you avoid them at all possible costs, even at the expense of being slightly aloof.

Not that I knew any of this my first day of junior year. Sitting, listening to the bald man at the front, I thought the idea that God made all men equal was just a given to Americans, excluding the bigoted idiots of course. We had the Civil Rights movement, women’s rights marches, and every amended law in between so that America was the land of opportunity for all people. I never thought that I would be one of the ones still having to fight for Jefferson’s promise to be fulfilled.

I’m in Central London trying to get the 188 home. A driver pulls up to the stop looks at me and insists that London buses don’t have wheelchair ramps. Now in a lot of ways, I can’t say I really blame him for being a fool, just like I can’t be blamed for being born with a disability. He doesn’t know that I have lived in London for years. He doesn’t know that I’ve used 3 buses today, all of which had wheelchair ramps. He probably doesn’t even know that one entire side of his double-decker bus is devoted to a full color ad declaring all buses in London to now be wheelchair accessible. And I’m assuming that he has no idea that I work for Transport for London and I just met his supervisor last week. All he knows is that he is one hundred percent right and I have a disability, which makes me automatically one hundred percent wrong.

Like I said, people shouldn’t blamed for how they are naturally.

Except it is this exact excuse which keeps London miserably inaccessible to wheelchair users and woefully under prepared for the Olympics / Paralympics in 2012. Yes, the London Underground was started in 1863. Yes, London is a city where things are so old that every piece of construction could qualify for a blue historical plaque. Yes, the city is hard for anyone to get around in. None of this justifies the fact that we are now five years after Britain passed the Disability Discrimination Act and there is still not a single reliable form of transportation in London for disabled people to use. As a transportation advisor, I’ve heard public officials try to justify these conditions over and over. And you know what, after all this time and all the warning, after America passed its disability legislature a full fifteen years before Britain passed it, there is still no good way for person’s who have anything less than a fully functioning body to get around in London.

An athlete in the Paralympics stands to be insulted by the ground staff at any London airport. They would be appalled to learn just how many taxi drivers don’t know how to use their own ramps, and how many bus drivers deny that ramps even exist. And, my guess is, after a day or so, they would consider themselves lucky to even get on a train with the level of resentment I’ve seen from most station staff. And the London Underground has a goal of making thirty three percent of all stations on the system accessible by 2013… that’s it, just one third. These are the situations I see in London on a daily basis. In one of the world’s most diverse cities, access is far from being even “manageable.”

When determining nation wide access, the concrete obstacles are often easiest to change. The mental blocks that people throw up are always inhibit equality more than issues of bricks and mortar. Now my worry is that people are falling for ‘good enough,’ and the idea that London was never made to be accessible. Maybe if you have the luxury of taking this attitude London’s accessibility today seems impressive. But to those of us who are dependent on accessible transit, these conditions are paltry to say the least.

People of London you have just under three years to inform, change, and build. The first thing you must do is stop hiding behind your “nature” however justifiable of an excuse it may provide. Since when has something right ever been easy? I don’t think with this little time left Londoners can accomplish the necessary adjustments to make this city wheelchair friendly. Prove me wrong.

Apparently, I’m a fire hazard.

              I was not made aware of this until I was rejected from an internship last week. The theatre I was looking to work at is up three flights of stairs above a local pub. I frequent the theatre all the time, climbing up the staircases and making my way into the theatre all the time, occasionally putting a little extra weight in my escort’s arm. I was aware of the stairs when I chose to apply for the position. I was equally aware that I could navigate the stairs by myself safely and effectively. The stairs were a non issue for me. It should have been likewise for the theatre company.

              But then again who am I to say what I am capable of?

I never asked for a reason as to why I didn’t get the position. The company willfully offered it on their own in an email. “Although we understand the nature of your disability allows you to climb stairs, we are concerned that in the event of a fire, you would impede safety for yourself and others in the building.” And that was the end of their reasoning.

        What’s most troubling about this situation is that it occurs at least three times per year. Because a building is not accessible, the potential employer hides behind health and safety law as a means of negating any form of disability discrimination law. To be able to escape the compensatory obligations of one law by hiding behind another law represents a failure on the part of lawmakers to form a cohesive code of conduct. Worse still, it prevents society from ever effectively progressing. During the 1950’s in America we found ourselves equally able to escape the law via other laws. We called this heinous situation the Jim Crow laws and they are looked upon now as a disgraceful barrier towards civil rights.

        What is, perhaps, the most disturbing about being called  an occupational fire hazard is that it takes values such as choice and independence out of my hands. No longer am I able to decide for myself when I am able to safely walk up and down a flight of stairs. Furthermore, achieving the goal of being able to do so is no longer enough. Rather, it is up to an outside source who knows very little about me and my condition, to decide what I am capable of. Outside sources, governing experts and pragmatic cautions overstepping their boundaries often result in putting more shackles on the individual, not safety  features.

        Assuming of course that the only reason I didn’t get the position was because I would prove to be a fire hazard in the workplace, I appreciate the theatre’s desire to keep me safe. But really, that decision should be my call. I know my capabilities and limitations. I weighed all those considerations before I applied for the job and they are not their choices to make. Oddly enough, if I prove to be such a fire hazard, I’m surprised they didn’t saying anything about me going up three flights of stairs to pay them money for a ticket. I guess occupational hazards only occur when the money flows in a certain direction. 

              When I finally sat down to clear through my emails this morning, I was greeted by a common enough occurrence. It was a response from a complaint I filed months ago.

              “Dear Ms. Stevens,

              We were very saddened to hear about your expirences with our company during X concerning the matter of Y. Let me assure you that we pride ourselves at Z on our customer service.  This matter will receive a full investigation.  However, let us remind you that our policy for customers that need special assistance is that we require 48 hours notice in order to give you our best service.  Please keep this in mind when making further arrangements.”

              The above is the excuse of the British across the island.  They are more than happy to give a disabled person full service as long as the customer gives them forty-eight hours notice that they will require their services.  What kind of person can plan their life so far ahead that they will be able to determine forty-eight hours in advance when they are going to need to run out to the store and get an emergency carton of milk because they’re making a cake?  Public transportation systems such as Southeastern Railway live and die by the excuse that if I don’t let them know when I need to use their trains two days in advance, they aren’t required to get out a ramp and help me onto the train car. 

              The thing is, even if someone does call forty-eight hours in advance, half the time the request doesn’t get to the appropriate personnel.  It’s like the special assistance line of so many companies are just for show and don’t actually connect to the main office.  My suspicions are even further encouraged when I am told that I need to dial a different number to reach the special assistance line, and that the head office cannot automatically transfer me to the correct extension. In fact, most of the time, the two offices aren’t even in the same town. 

              To require forty-eight hours advanced notice is not equal access. End of story. Don’t fool yourself. Don’t console yourself by believing a lie. Nobody else has to make reservations to use a bus two full days before actually stepping onto it. In fact, after a quick poll amongst my university colleagues, I found that none of them even had the ability to consistently plan that far ahead. And many of those friends study at Ivy Leagues now.

              The bit about this whole situation which I find most disturbing is the abject arrogance that the forty-eight hour rule fosters. By saying that I can only make plans forty-eight hours in advance, do you know how many opportunities you’re expecting me to forego? It means no spontaneous dates, no sudden trips out to the movies, and no going into town at a moments notice to see an upset friend. Emergency meetings at work or sudden business trips are now out of the question, thus jeopardizing my job. The forty-eight hour rule is invasive, suggesting that I could never have an appointment of any importance which required unexpected travel. Above all, I find this suggestion not only insulting, but simply erroneous as well.

              I’ll close by addressing those whom the forty-eight hour rule directly affects. Do not be fooled. Do not stand for the reasoning that any advanced notice required for special assistance counts as equal access. If able bodied people can just show up and fully use a company’s services, you should be able to as well. Do not allow the fact that they are understaffed as a sufficient reason as to why they need forty-eight hours advanced notice. If a restaurant is understaffed do they turn away people who haven’t made a reservation? The fact that they are understaffed is their problem, not yours. Do not allow them to throw the weight of poor business planning onto you, their paying customer.

              As much as possible, refuse to comply with the forty-eight hour rule. The only thing that allows companies to continue with this absurd and degrading practice is your submission to it. You can refuse to give it to them. You can demand to travel as freely as anyone else. You must point out this absurd and insulting presumption in order to put and end to it. The forty-eight hour excuse is poor logic at best. And, like everything else in life, falling for a fallacy can do as much damage as perpetuating it.

Last week’s death of Eunice Kennedy Shriver left the country mourning a wonderful woman. I was told about the loss in an email from a friend who then followed the news by saying “What an amazing woman. You will be just as inspirational, if not more, to millions some day, as well.” I know what she was trying to say. I love her for the encouragement she meant to send me. I just couldn’t help but be very frustrated by it.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver boldly started the Special Olympics during a time when there were no such opportunities for persons with conditions such as Downs Syndrome and Autism. This should be praised. Somehow, in the American Public’s mind, the mentally disabled population got transformed into the idea that a Special Olympic athlete could be anyone with any disability, be it physical or mental.

For much of my teenage years I was training as a Paralympic hopeful. The difference between the level of competition between the two is striking. Whereas the Special Olympics takes the attitude that “everyone here is a winner,” most people will come home from the Paralympics without an award. In the latter the competition is fierce, frightening, and very real. So, growing up training on the Great Lakes Navy Base in the middle of January, if a well meaning teacher told the class I was getting ready to participate in the Special Olympics the result was a tornado.

The confusion between the Special Olympics and the Paralympics disturbs me on two levels.  The first is that the latter seems to lack the media machine which the former has. (Or maybe it’s just the fact that the Special Olympics is blessed enough to have the name Kennedy behind it? Either way…) Most Americans are still clueless about what the Paralympics are. The games still seem to stand in the shadow of the Special Olympics. The fact that the confusion still exists is distressing to every Paralympic athlete I have ever known. It would be like telling Tiger Woods that he had to compete in the Pan-African Games when he isn’t African in the first place.

I also feel that the prominence of the Special Olympics has served to create the association in people’s minds that all disabilities are mental disabilities.  I find this consistent fallacy enraging and have done so ever since I was very small. This presumption is, in essence, the sort of mass funneling and insistent misclassification of all persons with disabilities. After being wrongfully shuffled off to special education classrooms and insults from strangers who assume that they know what’s better for me than I do, the association makes me more than a little on edge.

The work of Eunice Kennedy Shriver was brilliantly admirable. I just regret that it has seemed to cause so much miscommunication. For all the good that was done by her efforts, it created a very frustrating response in my own life. By assuming that all persons with disabilities fit into one specific category or could be served by one specific charity, those who thought they knew about the Special Olympics ignored the wealth of diversity and gifts that were right in front of them. Which is, I think, just the opposite of what Eunice Kennedy Shriver intended to do.

Recently, two of my friends encouraged me to read the book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. The book, written by Haruki Murakami, details his own experience with long distance running and how it connects to his philosophy of life. Everyone I know loves it. Everyone I know owns a pair of running shoes. It is a very strange thing to hear about something as common as running and have absolutely no frame of reference as to what your friends are talking about.

I, of course, could easily have my equivalents. A road racer for several years, I know fully the feeling of wind in my hair combined with the repulsion of seeing a rotting animal on the side of the road which Murakami describes so poignantly. Or I could write What I talk About When I Talk About Tying my Shoes which would detail the two hours it would take me to complete the act and the Zen like state I force myself to go into so I can avoid chucking my Nike’s into the Thames. At the end of the narrative, I would explain how my ticket to inner peace is a pair of $500 Stuart Weissman’s in black leather and with a three inch heel because they slip on so easily. This, most likely, is not what the author was hoping to inspire.

After reading Murakami’s book I had questions, lots of questions. Questions like: why is running uphill difficult? Why doesn’t anyone run down hill? Doesn’t it hurt your knees? What makes a good pair of running shoes? I even asked one of my guy friends to explain to me what chaffing was. Admittedly I was wholly unprepared for the response. There was suddenly this universe that everyone else knew about which was utterly foreign to me. I was totally lost in spin off conversations about the London Marathon or the hardest places to ran in Southwark. And in between the descriptions of the mud and the knee pain, the panting and the roadkill I kept reiterating my original question: why the hell would this put anyone in a zen-like state?

For Murakami,  running (and life) is about the process and the journey along the run. It’s about meeting the goals you set for yourself rather than being the fastest in the race. And on the one hand, I understand that. As someone who didn’t learn to walk until age ten, seeing the milestones is sweeter than whizzing by them.  Coming to what ought to be childhood rights of passage later means the phase of discovery is unending. I love being twenty five and getting to ask stupid questions that everyone thinks they know the answer to. I loved being a university student and finger painting for the first time. But I am still a very ambitious creature, unwilling to let go of being the fastest in the race when it comes to certain competitions.  Maybe because of this I’m not as well balanced as I would like to pretend. Or maybe its what one friend told me about running, “when there’s a road closed, you better make damn sure you know the detours really well.”

              I realize that when most people my age claim to be boycotting Starbucks, its normally for some social justice reason. People don’t like it because its run by a Zionist, or because they’re opposed to some trace ingredient, or its too hot, or the beans come from the wrong place, or its too overpriced, or its too popular so Caribou Coffee is a much better option. Fair enough, I suppose. And truly whenever I go into one, I get very nervous as well. 

              Someone once tried to heal me at a Starbucks. 

              Let me explain. People try to heal me all the time, I would say at least once every three months. It used to be much more frequent than that but then my family moved to Las Vegas and I moved to London, two places where, apparently, miracles never happen because people don’t do it as often. Perhaps those of us from these two towns are all just godless commies who don’t deserve miracles. Or maybe now that I’m older I seem like I’m beyond all hope so why bother asking. Either way, it used to happen once a month so its become much less common. Of this I am grateful. 

              On this particular occasion I was with my mother at Starbucks, eating a chocolate covered biscotti. The only thing going faster than my fourteen year old  brain was my fourteen year old mouth. A single braid going down my back as I prattle on relentlessly about all things important to being fourteen. And then there was my mother who, having already learned the most important skill of raising a teenage girl, drowned me out by reading a magazine.  

              And then I stopped talking. 

              Upon realizing this, my mother jerked her head up to see a young woman who had firmly taken both of my hands, bowed her head, and had started praying- IN TONGUES! There was no swaying her. Like someone left over from an ancient crusade, she was going to pray for my recovery damnit! Three minutes of the holy ritual passed, then four, then five. My chocolate biscotti was melting into my hands. 

              What is there to do in such a situation? How do you hope to maintain a sliver of political correctness when someone is speaking in tongues and thereby ruining your after school snack. All attempts of me pulling my hand away were failing- she just held on tighter. Besides, as someone who believes in God herself I have to ask, what could the woman be asking God for that could possibly take six minutes? Clearly, He’s very busy and I am too so I try to keep my correspondences brief.  This was now teetering on unedited which is never a good thing. Of course perhaps she was going for something which required six minutes of specification. I couldn’t tell because she was speaking in tongues! In fact, for all I know she could’ve been sending up Satan and his seven best friends, asking them to smite me from existence. I just try to assume the best of people. 

                At the eight minute mark the chocolate of my biscotti was molded to my hands, and she looked up from her prayers, tears in her eyes, and said to my, very stunned, mother: “She’ll be alright now.” 

              I was fine before! I put the biscotti down never to touch that particular after school snack again. And, I must say, if I’m ordering my morning grande mocha I am always on the lookout for possible carriers who may spread a viral prayer vigil throughout the coffee shop, thereby making Starbucks more controversial than it already is. 

              The problem with boycotting Starbucks is you pretty much kill your chances for a first date in suburban America. In high school the ‘good boys’ would inevitably want to take us to Barnes & Noble followed by coffee as a primer. (Yes, I know I had a very exciting love life back then.) So you can imagine the reaction I recieved when I said not only did I not want to go to Starbucks, but I didn’t want to go because I was afraid that cult leaders would try to heal me. 

              Yes, I go to Starbucks now. They are pretty ubiquitous here in London and they usually  have accessible toilets (which is a true Starbucks Miracle). Like all boycotts that are started in young adult life, they eventually end. As we grow up we take jobs we hate, buy things we swear we would never buy, shop at stores we used to have a vendetta against. Our idealism turns to practicality once we realize there’s a little corner of the world we have to hold up. Which, I think, is the greatest ideal of all. 

              But I still won’t order a chocolate covered biscotti.

            When Sarah Palin mentioned special needs children in her speech at the RNC last year, there should’ve been a reaction akin to opening Pandora’s box. There wasn’t even a puff of smoke. Glenn Beck has a daughter with Cerebral Palsy. Fox News analyst Neil Cavuto was diagnosed with MS a number of years ago. Columnist Charles Krauthammer has been paralyzed since the 1970’s due to a car accident. Limbaugh received clocear implants. The more I watch the news, the more I see Washington pundits affected by disability. And still nothing changes.

            Disability, of course, knows no party lines. It is a true equal opportunity force that will mess up your life. But it does seem that key figureheads leaning right are being affected by disability. The lack of attention given to the subject shouldn’t be particularly surprising of course. It is often part of conservative ideology to ignore weakness and hide any deficiency. But for a party that is attempting to win back public favor, they’re missing a huge chance.

            If we are to define conservatism as a strict interpretation of the US Constitution, disability access goes under the heading of Jefferson’s promise. The role of a conservative government is to protect the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” while assuming that “all men are created equal.”  In terms of simply physical access, the Untied States have a very long way to go in creating equal opportunity for those of us who are disabled. I’m not talking about expert programs and government cheques which are designed to increase dependency. Democrats are really good at this technique,  but it only serves to cripple people even more. But what about physical access issues. For example, most people forget that Brown v. Board of Education does not guarantee equal access to education for all children. Ask any mom who has battled special education and she’ll tell you, schools will often place advanced placement classes in a room that isn’t wheelchair accessible assuming that no student with a disability will ever be smart enough to attend those classes. Sarah Palin knew this. Most Americans do not.

            What if the conservatives understood the disabled population as disenfranchised people rather than leeches trying to work the system? An inaccessible main street is as taxing as any tariff the government may impose.  What good are constitutional rights when you can’t even get out of your own home? The rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not inalienable as Jefferson claimed. You just need to injure your back to figure that one out.

            Even with a strict interpretation of the Constitution there are still human rights battles which need to be fought. We haven’t outgrown that document, as some politicians would have us believe. The fact is we haven’t even fulfilled it. We are people who love life and see potential in everyone. We are feeble humans fighting a losing battle against gravity and age. To deny our own humanity is to shrink our rights when they are no longer self evident. Which is when one needs them the most.