Never Walked In High Heels

“We are a Christian nation. We were formed as a Christian nation, and a Christian nation is what we shall claim to be. People forget that.” She was getting more frustrated in her debate. The quilt on the wall and the dried flowers were the quintessential marks of a country home. She lived in typical Middle America. Good, God-fearing, hardworking stock, who believed that all the founding fathers were men of God.

I didn’t say anything at first, but I thought back to my 11^th grade US History class and seemed to remember an early lecture brought on by an older teacher—no they weren’t all Christians I thought to myself. At least not in the way we think of when we say they were. Weren’t they deists? The longer I thought about it the more I agreed with my assumption. I finally went home to look it up on Wikipedia when my mother asked me to check my facts after breaking into the argument and making such a claim. I was right, most of them were indeed deists. I’m always envious of deists simply because I’m not one. In fact I’m the dead opposite. Reason and rationale is tempting to me though, as are many of the deist doctrines, but there are so many things I cannot agree on. Deism is best described as this: God is like a clockmaker, he put all the parts in place and let it unwind itself. It’s a kind of hands-off deity where God created the world and then sat back to watch—like he created the world for his entertainment—a substitute TV show. With this in mind, God doesn’t rule over every aspect of our lives. The ultimate anti-predestination argument, man makes his own destiny and every choice he makes is one that he is directly responsible for. Born out of the Enlightenment, this view of God is highly allowing of individualism, reason, and rationality.

Now bring that philosophy to the men who wrote our Constitution. It gives you a whole new perspective on that document doesn’t it? If you read it, all of it, you can see that that single piece of paper was meticulously written, word-by-word to allow a great amount of flexibility in interpretation. It was almost like the Founding Fathers felt the government should mimic their view of God—hands-off, let the country and people unwind how they will. There goal was to protect people’s rights and afford everyone civility.

We were not founded in the modern Christian ideals. America was truly a great experiment and nobody knew how it would turn out. In writing the Constitution, maybe nobody wanted to be responsible for the mistakes of the future. Write the document and see where the country goes. Sounds like a pretty radical idea even if it was based on the Enlightenment and reason. To afford people the greatest freedom and to make them responsible for everything they do, doesn’t agree with much of the modern interpretations of Christianity. It’s radical really, almost humanistic, and forces us to be the drivers of our own fate. The truth is, I’m unsure if any of the Founding Fathers knew what to envision when they drafted that document. Who in recent history had ever successfully tried to make a country? Any man would be panicked in such a situation, and I can’t help but wonder, did they even think America would last this long?

Current events are making people say America is going down hill or America is finally coming into it’s own—depending on who you ask. Looking at the Constitution, I can say that considering what the Founding Fathers envisioned, America has great flexibility to create whatever type nation it wants.

I’m an opinionated woman. I don’t mean to be going for the understatement of the year here or anything, but the fact is I spend a lot of time thinking and even forming my own conclusions. Public transportation is particularly good for this exercise as it allows me to observe, think and refine whenever there is little else to do.

So I was really surprised when during a conversation with a close friend I said, “I actually don’t care” in the middle of the debate. I try to think of everything in my spare time, but when he asked me about a major ethical issue, I just couldn’t be bothered. It wasn’t that I couldn’t come up with an opinion if I thought hard enough—of course I could—I just wasn’t sure that it was worth my effort.

I have a friend who doesn’t know the first thing about politics, several of them actually. Oddly enough, most of them are human aid workers—reviving people who are dying, rescuing people from floods or avalanches, going in where the rest of us barely dare to pray. I don’t consider myself as the same classification as those friends, but it’s interesting. Outside of naming our new President (and possibly our Vice President) they are completely lost in a political conversation. Ask them about some act in Russia, which turn orphans out of orphanages at 15 and they can tell you exactly who passed it, when, and why, as well as subsequent acts which resulted thereof.

I think the reason why they don’t follow politics is that my friends are too busy fixing things that the politicians in armchairs talk about changing as they smoke on cigars and go out to fancy dinners. The human service acts, which my friends undertake are the equivalent of feeding prisoners of war while the rest of us are talking about strategy. We like to believe in America that our vote is actively changing something, but the truth is that it isn’t. It’s like how some people believe that paying taxes is actually charity—there’s nothing charitable about voting. It’s not some humanitarian act. Humanitarian acts don’t come from a government legislator, they come from actively getting up out of your house and encountering the world face to face, which means not being home to watch the cable news shows, and in this way, my friends being clueless about politics isn’t really an issue.

Not everyone can move the middle of Siberia in order to make the world a better place. I realize that of course, and so it is up to those of us who do have time to follow politics and care about it, to ensure that the America my friends come home to when they need a break from saving the world, it is a country they can be proud of & in. This is the place of voting and taxes. It is not however, human aid work.

After this conversation, I put myself to a challenge. If I don’t have an opinion on something, I don’t give one, that’s okay too. My friends and I are passionate people—wanting to see the world change in a huge variety of ways. However, when you care deeply about many things you cannot afford the energy to superficially care about what everyone else thinks of as being important. In my mind some issues are more important than others, and the issues I don’t think are important need to be left to someone who is passionate about those issues because in the end, who knows if there’s anyone else passionate about mine.

Back in the classroom, Socrates was relentless towards the mind of sixteen year olds.

“Can we ever be untied? Look on a map, America is huge. Alaska, Kansas, New York all in one country. Let’s be reasonable.” Now he was doing his best to push everyone’s buttons.

I’ve been out of college a short while now and already two of my friends have needed to apply for handicap parking placards. Two years ago it was unthinkable, now they are applying for the blue placards which are permanent, rather than the temporary red ones. For someone who has found how we are all alike more interesting than how we are all different, the connection is striking. For most of us, as we age, America will be shrinking. What is different about disability rights from most civil right battles is that nobody will wake up suddenly being a different race, gender, or creed than when they went to bed. Life can change in an instant in that going for a jog one morning may be the last time we ever do it. This may be as simple as a bad knee or as traumatic as a car accident, but everyone’s body will fail him. Moreover the inaccessible America you  permit today is going to be the same one you will inherit tomorrow when your body breaks down. I’m not just advocating for my rights. I’m advocating for yours

But even the politicians, the ones who are supposed to be directly enacting the Constitution, remain blissfully unaware of how small America is on this issue. In between welfare reform and environmentalism, gay marriage debates and school vouchers, when was the last time you heard a story about disability rights on a news station? I can think of only one politician who consistently brings up the issue in her platform. Other than that, I feel like everyone else’s issues get debated in Washington except mine. Even though all men are ultimately feeble, the needs of all men are ignored.

What I learned that day in the classroom, took an additional six years to finally reach its full meaning. Like so many other things in life, you don’t realize what rights are until they are taken away. It’s as simple as someone in the grocery store insisting that I really want skim milk when I’m reaching for the two percent. Most people when they think about disability rights think of assisted care or special services. I don’t need that. I just want to get where I’m going unimpeded by a staircase, someone who thinks they know my limitations, or even an overbearing special service. Don’t give me add on’s until you’ve figured out how to fully give me my unalienable rights. This doesn’t mean I don’t have those rights yet. I still have them, America (or anywhere else I’ve lived) just hasn’t figured out how to respect them. Special care facilities, special education, even special funding is no replacement for freedom. Any revolutionary in American  history could’ve told you that. They could also tell you that sooner or later, that freedom eventually came. Even after living in the real world, I cannot give up hope that I will join them.

“I’m still waiting for an answer.” He looks at what we are all looking at… the clock. Our books are still being clutched to our chests in anticipation. “Miss Stevens, you’ve had your hand up for some time now.”

“Maybe the phrase all men expands as civil rights expands… Uh… It could’ve meant all males with property then but now it means all humans… or-or at least it should.”

“Go on.”

“It just expanded to incorporate more and more people until today, everyone is equal.”

“So the history of America-“

“The history of America is the story of the phrase ‘all men’ expanding.” He looked at me and nodded approval. The bell rang.

That’s what I said one rainy August morning when I was sixteen. It would take me years to learn the weight of what it meant.

The preceding is a narrative from Athena’s book The Perfect Sole due out this winter.

“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.

One of my best friends and I have been following a Supreme Court case which has recently completely engrossed our dinner time conversation. Last month they reached a verdict, but we still can’t let it go. A middle school-aged girl, suspected of hiding painkillers, was strip searched in front of the school nurse and another female teacher after no prescription drugs were found found in her locker. The US Supreme Court fortunately has ruled that the search was unconstitutional and went against an individual’s right to privacy. The student, and if I might say victim, in this situation is now in college and although the decision brings closure, it cannot begin to undo the damage brought on by the incident.

There’s something about being in a school setting, which forces individuals, who are otherwise quite pleasant, to come under the false assumption that there is no governing body higher than there own and nothing any parent or student can do to complain will ever have ramifications on an administrative career. The situation that invoked the Supreme Court case was of course every parent’s worst nightmare. You send your child to school to educate them in  reason and logic. You expect faculty and staff to treat your student with decency, showing them how a moral upright person is to behave in a larger society. Students are taught that they should trust their teachers, and I think the relationship with those in front of the classroom can often prove to be as important or as detrimental as a relationship with a parent. What happened was of course a breech of power, but it was so much more than that as well. What the students learned is that there is no law, and in this particular situation, that might makes right. Is a classroom full of young people where we want to call this into question? Forced to strip down to her underwear and shift her breasts to prove that there was nothing in her bra, the teachers who observed the strip search actually advocated for her to turn off her mind, her conscience, and her self-respect for their own suspicions.

What disturbs me about this case is that I know this abuse of power and manipulation of students happens on a daily basis. I have seen it happen in my own education, which is why I find the case so angering. If our teachers are responsible for educating and molding the next generation, what does it mean to teach children that there is no right to privacy and that any official can demand a strip search and must immediately be complied with? How can we ever teach that a woman has a right to choose what happens to her own body when this occurs? Such is a recipe for a rampant abuse of power particularly when brought upon a student who has no prior history of using any harmful substances. What is obvious about this situation is the fact that the faculty who administered the search were used to living in fear and thought that such mandatory complacency was perfectly acceptable. I wish more parents were involved in their children’s education to the extent of being willing to take the school administration to court when they are severely in the wrong. I am fortunate enough to have parents who were willing to do so and who taught me to do likewise. The greatest education that can be received often comes from the mistakes of the teachers who are supposed to be offering it freely. Battles with school administration are unfortunately an everyday occurrence if you are a student with a disability and critiquing though they might be, they teach you never to turn of your mind, always to question authority, and how to really be an aware individual, even if it means always being suspicious of those in charge.

              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.

I’m disabled, I live in a socialist country, and I live among those very  strange people called artists. My monthly healthcare premium is exorbitantly high due to a preexisting condition. If anyone should be pro universal health care it should be me.

Obama’s current push towards free health care fills me with dread and little else.

Now there are some healthcare practices which everybody should have for free. And if there ever could be such a thing as free universal health care the world would doubtless be a much better place. But on this planet, the terms “free” and “universal” are very often mutually exclusive.  

If someone could just answer a few questions that I have, I would feel much better. The first is: in a government hospital, who do you sue when malpractice occurs?  I only know to ask this question because I have two childhood friends who became disabled from blatant medical malpractice in an army hospital. The problem, of course, comes in when you’re looking for a malpractice lawyer willing to try and sue the US government. And even if you are fortunate enough to fine the one self sacrificing attorney willing to jeopardize his career to prosecute his country’s government, what makes anyone think that the courts will be imperial? In a world where politicians think they are also doctors, who heals the justice system?

People have often reminded me when I bring up this question that I am ‘focusing on the exceptional situation, and the exceptional situation will always be the exception  not the rule.’ Maybe because I consider myself to be an exceptional person, I find this concern valid. Problem is, I don’t know anyone who isn’t “exceptional.”

This ‘exceptional argument’ leads me directly into my second question: when government starts making medical care decisions, who is going to keep politics out of the operating room?

Any healthcare system is going to be working with the problem of limited resources and limitless ailments. Any medical professional that engages in the battle  for health is admirably fighting a loosing  and highly inefficient war.  Government, on the other hand, is inevitably about pragmatism and finding the best answers for the greatest numbers of people. Everyone forgets that ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ focuses on being efficient and that such smooth running bureaucracies cannot  leave room for exceptional people.

And so, inevitably, when you add politics and government to medicine, everything becomes about cost and value. Limited resources, such as beds, will be  dived up according to which life needs to be saved for the greater good and which ones will be a drain on society.

In America’s national healthcare debate, no one is bringing up that there was a society which tried universal healthcare back in the 1930’s. It was Germany and it lead directly to  the Holocaust via Action T4. For those out there who know their history and still think I am leading to an exceptional leap of logic, let me ask: do you really think that Nazi leaders were all that different  from us? Are we not, as humans, made from the same stuff?

I really don’t have a problem with universal heath care in America as  long as someone could address these issues rather than repeating an ideal. But any attempts to define the limits and concerns about the system are met with harsh accusations of conspiracy theory. These are logical questions  not being addressed, which makes me wonder: what  else will be ignored in the name of pragatism? 

              Sometimes academics have far too much time on their hands.

              A typographical error on my part allowed me to discover the word ‘womyn’ in Wikipedia yesterday. As with any of my experiences with Wikipedia this leads to what I call ‘justifiable and educational procrastination,’ aka spending hours clicking on links to learn about things that are utterly unrelated to my life. Its an addiction without a 12 step program.

              It seems that the term ‘womyn’ was a product of feminists in the 1970’s wanting to remove the ‘man’ from ‘woman.’ It comes from the branch of feminism that seeks to correct the inherent biases in language because the word ‘woman’ suggests that female humans are a subset of male humans.

              This emphasis shift to gender neutrality rears its ugly head for me as a writer all the time. Several of my friends have vocalized their disturbance that I use the word ‘he’ to refer to an editorial person. “Why not use ‘he or she,’ or better yet, just use ‘their.’” Has anyone ever tried to write in iambic verse or with an ear for cadence while using the term ‘he or she’? It’s cumbersome, clumsy, and sounds absurd. Take the line from The Merchant of Venice when Portia describes any monarch with “His sceptre shows the force of temporal power.” Say that out loud. Now just try to say “His or her sceptre shows the force of temporal power,” without sounding like a legal document. It just doesn’t work. You wouldn’t tell a painter that every time he (or she) used the color red he (or she) had to put the color blue next to it. Why would you exert that level of control over a writer?

              And using ‘their’ isn’t an option because its just wrong grammatically. If you doubt me, refer to your middle school grammar books.

              Which brings me back to the neologism of ‘womyn.’ The fact that there is a little red line on my screen telling me there’s a spelling error every time I write ‘womyn’ tells me there’s a problem. As a writer, I am a firm believer that words mean something. It is because of this opinion that I hope to be careful about the words I use. And while language is a wonderfully flexible thing (Shakespeare, it is said, introduced 1,700+ words into the English language), the fact is the entire basis for the argument of the existence of the term is unfounded.

              ‘Woman’ is not a diminution of ‘man’ as some might suggest. The word is germanic in origin where ‘man’ and ‘mann’ have two distinct meanings. In German ‘man’ is a gender neutral subject (as in mankind or human) whereas ‘mann’  means someone of male gender. Oddly enough my spell check seems to like the word mann much more than womyn.

              If you want to be egalitarian about it, here’s what I propose. Get rid of the word ‘woman.’ (This is the point where all my female friends look for the biggest rock that’s nearby to throw at my head.) Just stop using the word. You don’t need it. Then use ‘man’ to mean anyone regardless of gender. Then use the scientific words of male and female if you need to specify. As science can tell you, using these terms doesn’t denote any superiority of one over the other, it signifies biological difference. That’s all.

              I have now spent some hours contemplating the use of the word ‘woman’ and am surprised at how much time can go into a debate about a single letter. And the thing is, just as in any schism, those who want to be insulted by the spelling of a word will always choose to be.  In this way, 200 years after changing the spelling to womyn there would no doubt be a faction demanding that men and womyn are exactly the same and we should, therefore change it back.