Never Walked In High Heels

I believe firmly in the power of the individual. That’s not a particularly popular statement to say these days. We are told over and over by our world that it is best if we don’t think of the self, but rather what we can do to help the world as a whole and focus on others rather than just ourselves. While this altruistic theory is admirable it forgets one key thing…often it takes the individual in all of his uniqueness in refusing to settle for the status quo that can ultimately improve circumstances for everyone.

A friend once told me, “It is the person who is aware that he has more advantages than those around him who can use those same advantages to change the world for the people who lack them.” I believe what he meant was, that one cannot be afraid to hide one’s talents and to stand out in a crowd by doing the best that one absolutely can when some of those around him are unable to perform at the same level. Furthermore what he meant was, a social leader (someone who is truly capable of bettering the world and changing conditions for everyone) must carefully balance along a philosophical tightrope. One hand hovering over self understanding and the other reaching for how he can use his best qualities to aid the situation he finds himself in. In short, perhaps the industrialists of the 20th century weren’t so far off when they insisted loudly over and over again that the cream that rises to the top sweetens all of the milk.

To put it another way, using a biblical reference which was made famous by comic book character Uncle Ben in Spiderman: “To him whom much is given, much is expected.” It is the responsibility of the exceptionally gifted to realize where they could be and in actuality where they are, understanding the schism is how change starts. Often it takes the best educated, the most cunning, and those with the greatest skill in writing and rhetoric to attack issues of injustice. If anyone, regardless of their level of education or skill was able to attack these sentiments, it is doubtful that there would be issues of inequality in the first place. Often it is the financially blessed who have the time and energy to pull themselves full steam into social causes that would otherwise be ignored, understaffed or mishandled if left up to those who have to carry full time jobs and maintain a steady income.

In writing this I cannot help but look around and examine my own living conditions, realizing that I am indeed exceptionally blessed regardless of my struggles and even though most individuals who meet me are faced at one time or another with grappling with all that I cannot do rather than all of my positive and viable assets. While most people in my life see me as struggling, I cannot help but swallow hard when I see another disabled person in the street. Who is alone, and not provided for as I am. It forces me to realize that my struggles are like most of us, exceptionally small in comparison and an understanding that I am indeed one of the fortunate ones. One who is able to express herself and stand up in one form or another for what she believes in and who is able to take rests in between the periods when great perseverance is required. I admit that there is so much work that is yet to be done, and that those tasks include my own sacrifices as well as those of the greater collective.

After he left I was in a panic. My friend had come over to do some work on the house and in the process of accomplishing various tasks, he let slip the latest news release on how the world is supposedly going to end. Part of me immediately fell into the trap, and then the more logical side woke up when he said “Things will be as terrible as they used to be,” and I thought to myself, the world kept on turning before modern technology. If we lose it now, regardless of the worst case scenario, the world will keep turning still, and somehow everything will be alright. Perhaps I am forced to think with this level head on my shoulders because I know if it was Armageddon, I am doomed. I am considered physically weak and according to evolution and survival of the fittest I shouldn’t have made it this far at all. I have visions of myself succumbing to cannibals when food becomes scarce and I just think, “Really, what can I do?”

Part of this is because I have taken the time in my mind to examine the worth of life, any life, just existing regardless of what we accomplish or what we are physically or mentally capable of doing. To do this, one must determine what he means by the word “worth” or more importantly, what he means by the word “life.” Such big philosophical questions often have more of a practical application when it comes to examining family affairs. The older generations define both with dignity. My fascination with the subject probably began when the matriarch of my mothers side of the family was succumbing to the final gruesome stages of Alzheimer’s after ten years of struggling with the ailment. At that time all of us in the family had to examine what we meant when we said the word “life.” What is a single life worth?

It’s easy to fall into the utilitarian trap of the greatest good for the greatest number of people, but often it is the individual lives that lead to any great good for a great many people. I think Henry Ford and the first assembly line. It is one of history’s greatest ironies thata the live of the man who invented the assembly line points to the fact that no discovery or invention was started by a collective, and they certainly not a collective deemed to be in charge of the world. Yet while they are simply individualized single lives that together if died en masse, would make up a statistic. The world would look incomparable to how it looks now if these people never lived long enough to give the world their greatest creations.

A premature loss of life either by tragedy, brutality, or someone deeming the situation “for the best” is a premature loss of possibility for the world. These possibilities mean options are exactly what we need in crisis situations. People who are willing to look at the world in all of its ugliness and examine what exactly what needs to be done to make it better are the type of people that end massive tragedies.

To the people who seek to solve the problem by saying over and over, the “greatest good for the greatest number of people, I wish to say “at what time?” Einstein wasn’t particularly bright growing up and if he were brought up somewhere else he probably wouldn’t have become the amazing scientist that was living inside him even in his early years. Sometimes the benefit we can give the world must be allowed to safely and securely grow before it becomes apparent. It is for this reason that I question such dangerous practices and panicked forms of thinking which dictate that we live for survival rather than living for life.

I truly believe that there is no such thing as a wasted life. Even the most dependent among us, those that often seem a burden and are unable to attain any goal other than simply existing teach us how wonderful life is and how beautiful we are by just being ourselves comfortably without striving to be more than simply who each of us were made to be. In short, even those of us who are most in need of assistance, unable to perform the most basic tasks, teaches volumes which are so easily forgotten.

The world in general seems to have it’s favored causes. Put on any news station or get any paper and you see the same issues over and over again from environmentalism, the desperate longings for prominent issues such as gay rights, taxes, immigration status to be solved and verified. Favored causes are pushed both by the media and academics into our living rooms and classrooms. In both examples, there is the perfect target audience; someone who is unable to escape the lectures of a reporter or professor either because that individual is in their home or is the recipient of the listeners tuition.

We all know the plight of the panda, the anguish of certain anorexic superstars, the heinous hysteria of healthcare and so forth, and these are admirable causes but what about the issues that we never see. How very few of us know about the dying rooms in countries like China dedicated to the starvation of infant girls, or that the western media often forgets to carry news of South Africans rioting? The situation of orphans being turned out of orphanages at an extremely young age in Russia, or simply the fact that there are still people in America forced to work for next to nothing?

I admit that I am biased, as a woman with a disability my issues seem to never fall into favor with the media. People assume that the London Underground is accessible just because there is a law and discrimination has been “terminated” worldwide. It gets next to no media coverage and, truth be told, most academics are not even aware of these situations, so why should anyone know about certain struggles when there is little done to report of them?

A friend of mine said the other day over a dinner conversation that watching the news now sends him into panic attacks. There are so many issues he is made aware of by the BBC and CNN that there is no other response he can summon up in himself except for panic. I couldn’t help but think and admittedly I added to his panic in stating this; it isn’t the issues that we know about of which we should be concerned, rather the one’s we don’t hear about that are the most dreadful and most sinister. For every missing child the media races after, there are dozens others that are never found and the stories lost. A particularly gruesome murder is only represented as many others go unnoticed. The world is not as horrible as it appears on the news, but in truth, we only receive a fraction of the story.

There are of course and always will be favored causes that seem to get all of the media attention; the grants, the money from the government, and even the justification of admiring friends, and there are some that don’t matter in the world to us regardless of how closely they touch our own hearts. Perhaps these are the issues we should be dedicated to, the ones we feel we are personally invested in regardless of the fact that they are currently the popular and dramatic issues or not. It is precisely because the media does not hold a certain issue as a favored cause that we would do well to make it our own. 

Several years ago I found myself working in the mission fields of Mexico side by side with a nihilist who was acting as my personal assistant. I always enjoy working with nihilist; they tend to keep things in adequate perspective. After all, if you believe in nothing, then even the biggest crisis is no reason to lose one’s head. She was particularly special to me since she agreed to come help us build a drug rehab center and give herself with sweat and construction work by day, assisting me when we got back to the compound to rest, while at the same time proclaiming that she refused to believe in God, Faith, or even Existence. Stopping to rest and drink some Joya one afternoon I examined the local people passing by. Many were poor; many more were in need of something whether it was material or otherwise. I felt the sun on my back as I exclaimed “I feel sorry for them”.

“Why?” She made her question sound more like a statement than an inquisitive response as she undid her shawl which was currently on double duty between covering her legs on the days we were in churches and acting as a cool top on the days we were at work pouring and mixing cement. She never followed the conservative dress code of the organization she was with, and for that single opinionated explanation I respected her.

“They don’t even know what they are missing, it’s like they don’t know that they are poor and I feel bad that they will never rise to have the same advantages that I have.”

“Well they sure as hell won’t with people like you saying that!” I was shocked by her biting anger. This response was atypical of a person who insisted that nothing existed. She got down on one knee and looked me square in the eye, “Don’t ever tell people that they are poor, don’t even think about them having less than you. It’s when we label people as such that we place them in obscurity.”

Her point was fierce but one that I would do well to remember more often. I believe, particularly when working with young people, that when you hold a level of expectation in front of somebody they will do everything possible to rise to that level. Likewise if you out rightly label them as being poor or disadvantaged, disabled or even having “special needs,” they themselves will define their entire existence by such a label thus never having their eyes opened to the fact that someone out there thinks they have potential. The higher the standard presented, the higher a person will rise.

I often think of this proportional reality when I see people of my own age swooping in to fix a problem when they are unaware of the complexities and nuances involved. Many of my peers have insisted on serving human interests in an organization such as the Peace Corp. or attempting to justify it on an more academic level by getting their degrees in anthropology and insisting that they can save the world by their field work. Such an attitude is necessary in the role of a young person’s assistant. It acts as fuel to get us off to a roaring start. But often citing low standards and insisting that a group of people can not have much expected from them does little except to encourage dependency. Lowering standards is often seen as taking pity on a person, but inevitably someone who is pitied will become pitiful.

Perhaps I am more acutely aware of this issue because I myself have experienced so much help in the name of pity; people insisting that I needed more help than I actually did and should not be able to account for much. The thing is, even when a person attempting to give aid doesn’t say out right “I pity you”, you always know. Even their help seems stale or rancid and disingenuous. Their smiles seem deceitful and often well planned. Every act they commit, every item they give you simply reeks of false humility.

The difference between offering someone help out of pity and offering help because you empathize with their humanity is the difference between seeing people as belittling you and seeing people as equals. It is crucial for anyone attempting to perform acts of service to realize that quite easily, the roles could be reversed. The ones giving the service could become the individuals in need and the ones currently in need would have to take it upon themselves to serve. All of our states, our finances, our homes, our security is never fully established. One can jump from a single level of status in society to another within the blink of an eye. Service without pity, so that someday a person might not you’re your service, is to understand the crux of humanity. We all are desperate for others to honestly and willfully provide human aid and that we are never in need of pity.

People often ask why I do not join a community built for cripples (actually they say “individuals with physical limitations” but the stigma is still the same). I have trouble finding friends who also have physical disabilities and when possible, usually find it best to look at a person not for what he can or cannot do, but rather, who he is or isn’t. In this way, disabilities are the last thing that enter into my mind when examining the qualities of a particular individual. Many I speak to often find this point frustrating, occasionally to the point of hypocrisy. For me, it is simply, life.

I was never raised to be disabled. Growing up, my family did everything to keep me out of an extremely flawed special education system. Even today, the United Nations report that only three percent of all people with physical disabilities in the world are able to read. (http://www.un.org/disabilities/default.asp?id=18) Among women, that goes down to just one percent. This means that out of four hundred disabled women in the world, only one of them is literate. If this shocks you, I’m not surprised. It is shocking. Our world is blissfully unaware of what living conditions are like world wide for people with disabilities.

Recently I saw a report from the mayor of London analyzing the learning conditions of persons with in a city some consider the world’s capital. The title alluded to the idea that people with physical limitations almost live in a different city than London. Being unable to use a form of mass transit such as the London Underground and unable to access many of the neighborhood shops on any high street, people who have any sort of physical limitation know a very different London than those who are able bodied. Transportation is slower, stores with narrow aisles a bigger challenge, invasive even, and the looks from people on the street will often send individuals back inside their houses in order to avoid hostile environments.

But being disabled does not stop with environmental issues. As in any civil rights battle, the problem is steeper and more complex than one would care to imagine. When I was growing up I heard over and over again, “Be patient with yourself” and “take it slow.” Now why I would ever want to slow down when it took me and hour and a half to get dressed that morning is beyond me. However, taking it slow often gets transformed into setting lower goals for individuals with disabilities. It means taking it easy rather than slowly chipping away at a complex algebra problem. Some things, particularly in education cannot be rushed but more often than not the goal post for disabled individuals is removed entirely so that a substandard type of performance becomes acceptable lessening the amount of homework problems, showing the student that he should only have to read the Cliff Notes rather than the whole book, or even insisting that a book is too difficult for a student to read are all common occurrences for someone who was raised to think of himself as physically disabled and therefore expected to take no initiative in his own life. Thus, more often than not, the great schism which faces individuals with physical limitations is not the level of access in their environment but it is their submission to a type of institutionalization which works for societies comfort rather than the students good.

As has been the case with civil rights issues in the past, this false education and insistence that individuals with disabilities are helpless is more detrimental than any staircase or missing form of public transit. It is through the educational system that individuals with disabilities are still often given different books, different classes, different teachers, and different expectations which causes the schism between the fully able bodied world and the disabled world to continue year after year after year. By insisting that the disabled world is somehow separate (nobody said anything about equal) from the way fully able bodied people live their lives means that there will always innately be that division between different people. Inevitably by keeping any population separated, society ensures that they are marginalized. The mayor of London is right, living in London with a physical disability means living in an entirely different city than Londoners who are able to get about without much thought. Perhaps this is why I am so impatient when well meaning individuals tell me to take it slow. It takes me so long to get to my destination in the first place, if I were to take it slow I fear that my world would stop altogether.

It is a situation as old as politics and nearly as contrived. We see the Romans crying out first for Caesar, then Brutus, and finally Marc Antony. All are supposed to be the leaders who’ll save the day, the individual who is better at his job than his own predecessor, causing public excitement and all sorts of long-winded speeches in support for the new hero that has never served in public office. What is it about the unknown leader that allows us to view them as the all blame pin cushion? There is an ongoing myth that if the right person was elected, all of the issues surrounding the region, country, or the world would be solved and life would finally be blissful.

We really think that whoever this new leader is comes from our mindset and is able to see the world precisely how we see it. Ultimately, of course, this is a form of vanity in and of itself. Every individual on the face of the earth has this idea in the back of his or her mind that no one else can rightly see the world the same way that they does. In this way, politics is the ultimate form of vanity. We are able to project our world how we see it onto the face of someone who is running for office and then fill in a ballot assuming that this guy will agree with us and that he will be able to fix problem X, rewrite issue Y, and balance budget Z in order to solve everything. Thereby ending our need to feel guilty about those less fortunate, to make the world better ourselves, and to challenge our position in order to test what we really believe.

Of course in the forefront of our mind, we know that not everyone agrees the individual, so we accept and deny this respectively. The leaders with no track record who have done little in office except run for election allow us to have room to dream and a clean sheet whereon to project our new view. We believe in these projections and therefore are able to vote with a clear conscience, insisting that this time it will be different.

Like everything else, once the work starts it all changes. One by one that person who we handed our wish list to make the world a better place begins crossing out items we cannot afford and dropping pages that he chooses to ignore for a number of reasons. Once he begins to take action, we are then able to judge him by those actions and as always, they fall short of our expectations. He didn’t run the country the way I would do it. She didn’t help the type of people I would have helped. So we begin to look again, thinking that this time, for this election, we found the perfect guy for the job.

The race is never over. We think by stuffing a ballot in a box we have done our civic duty, but that is actually all we do, we simply pass our social responsibilities on to a person who we know full well will turn into our personal scapegoat. If we think that shaping the world by casting a vote for the ideal man is the pinnacle of fixing the world’s problems and the national equivalent of carrying in the messiah, than we are gravely mistaken on what the world truly needs. The hope of an unknown leader gives us the illusion that we are able to change the world by electing the guy who absolutely agrees with everything that we would do ourselves and seeks to enact our exact plan(s) into action. However, we brush the dirt off of our hands after casting the ballot.

My hands were trembling as I opened the letter. It explained to me that the railroad company involved was not at fault for my complaint; rather they listed it as an “unfortunate incident.” This term unfortunate kept cropping up as I read the letter further. It was unfortunate that I felt dissatisfied; it was unfortunate that things had not turned out better. However, there is nothing to be done. It was merely an unfortunate incident that could have happened anywhere and pointed the finger at no one.

In corporate situations both in the United States and the United Kingdom there seems to be a lack of willingness to apologize. Everything is either unfortunate or a mistake, but not worthy of a true apology. We as a society have seemed to forget that words on their most basic level actually mean something or perhaps we haven’t forgotten it at all. Perhaps the unwillingness to admit fault or wrongdoing is specifically because words mean something and if one company would say “it was our fault” a precedence would be set; meaning that the company itself was fallible and able to take responsibility for it’s own actions.

An unfortunate incident means that there is no one to point the finger at. There is nobody at fault in the situation. It’s a phrase that has been no doubt concocted by corporate lawyers seeking to make their client’s companies able to run as smoothly and unobtrusively as possible. But sometimes responsibility actually needs to be taken, and here is the area where the corporate lawyers would prefer to never acknowledge it’s own existence.

Corporate avoidance is what occurs when lawyers and representatives call an error an unfortunate incident, meaning that companies and corporations are above laws which individuals are subjected to. If there is ongoing discrimination within a particular department of a corporation, particularly when dealing with the public, it is routinely ignored, stating that the event was an abnormality and however advantageous and unfavorable said occurrence may have been, it is not to be ceased or rectified. Worse still, by refusal to take any action or responsibility to ensure that the customer will never be treated the same way again means that such behavior is encouraged within a corporation or a business. If an individual discriminated against his fellow man by refusing to allow someone with a physical disability onto a train, he would be called a bigot and a corporations policy did likewise, not only would the event be named as something culpable rather than discriminatory, arrogant or wrong.

For a corporation to refuse to take responsibility for it’s own behavior means that nobody who works for that company needs to feel guilty. Every single one of the lawyers who term the error as being an unfortunate incident can sleep at night knowing that no one will end up in jail and their legal team will calmly and quietly sweep the issue under the rug without further question.

If this is a world where unfortunate incidences occur rather than mistakes or wrongdoings, we are looking at a world where there are no legal checks in our system to make sure that companies and corporations treat individuals as fairly as individuals used to treat each other. Such a world means that there is no way for an individual to even begin to challenge a corporation which is unjustly jeopardizing his home, family, or life. 

The year is more than three quarters of the way finished and I have absolutely no idea what is going on in the world. As a challenge to myself I have decided as a new years resolution back in January that I would go an entire year without watching a single news update. As a result, it would not be too much to say that from my point of view, the entire world has changed. I find that as a result of not listening to the news I have much more love to give and many more experiences that I cannot help but think of whenever I enter a pub and hear the men arguing back and forth.

The people who are directly in front of me in my life, I am able to look at and think of more often. I am no longer interested in what their argument is and how I can persuade them to agree with me. I watch people as they talk to me and become concerned with their news and their lives, realizing that what the media constantly puts on as being crucial doesn’t matter so much as examining the lives of the people directly in front of me and seeing what exactly needs to be done to improve our own condition. The most important people in the world are not the ones with the power that live in big houses and have three different secretaries, rather they are the individuals who go out of their way to show me love and are able to experience life in tandem with me.

Furthermore, not watching the news ended all hopes of there ever being any sort of justifiable television watching. The news is the appropriate form of procrastination when one really stops to think about it. It’s the pretense of being actively concerned with the world and hoping to reshape it combined with a sense of false charity that allows an individual to feel good about himself and remaining educated while still sitting on the couch all day transfixed with what the news reporter is saying.

And finally as a result of not watching the news, I worry less; or at the very least, I worry about different things. I realize that the over hyped and manufactured fantasies that scroll across the bottom of one’s television screen are just another turn in the cycle of history. And while technology, products and quite possibly the fashionable length of hem lines differ from generation to generation, the major debates do not. What is the role of the government in the life of the individual? How can we remain safe, protected, and free? What needs to be done to make the world better and what is being done to provide fewer amenities to those who actually need more?

I think with three quarters of the year already passed and myself blissfully unaware of what exactly has gone on in the news, I am forced to realize that the media hysteria which is masterfully fashioned as some sort of guerilla psychology is simply a form of socially acceptable attempts to change the world. Changing the world has never been something that is particularly well thought of or thought out within the drawing rooms of society. Talking about altering the world might be popular, but actually doing so and evading peoples’ minds and attitudes in order to see a necessary revolution is undoubtedly frowned upon. And so the people who watch the news are able to start off repetitively that which reporters have said with a twinkle in their eye, hoping that the rest of America will earn their trust and see current events from their own point of view rather than actually going forward and discovering how to improve conditions and make changes themselves. 

He always bows at me as I go by him in my electric wheelchair. He is a man, one of many, who sells the “Big Issue” on the same street corner day after day. He interacts with everyone who walks by him, trying to look them in the eye and smile; often, he is able to get them to smile as well. More often than not, however, people do their best to ignore him; even changing directions to be out of his reach. His hair is longer and he has a beard the color of maple syrup as well as a jacket that says in big letters on the back “God Loves You.” In fact, in many ways it’s hard not to look at him and think of the old Sunday school pictures of Jesus with milky eyes, long hair and a beard; wanting to tell everyone that God loves each of them. It looks as if, except for the complacent eyes, this Big Issue seller could have modeled for any of those paintings from my early church days.

After nine months of driving past him, looking at my watch, sometimes managing a smile, but trying to avoid him all the same, I realized that I was being absurd. Here is an individual I saw everyday who always tried to make me smile and even more amusingly; always treated me like a queen by bowing whenever he saw me. So I stopped one morning when I could spare the time.

“This is absurd, I see you every day and I don’t know your name; what is it?”

“I’m Brian, what’s yours?”

And so, for a while, we chatted briefly, promising to call each other by name the next time our paths met (or rather I traveled down his path, depending on how you look at it).

Knowing Brian as a man named Brian, and knowing that he knows my name somehow makes the city of London seem instantly smaller. I can wave at him from across the street, or he can whistle and shout my name to get my attention. And because he looks so much like Jesus and insists that God loves everyone in this city, a city where the definition of love has been forgotten. It’s impossible not to make the connection between him and a life of faith.

Christ himself said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” in one of the most confusing texts ever written. The Beatitudes managed to tie any person regardless of religion and background in knots. At first it sounds like this man is handing out consolation prizes, “Well, you don’t get to be rich but at least you get to be blessed.” This is where some of our adamant anger against faith lies. A blessing is a lousy consolation prize when someone is starving. But what Brian illustrates is a world that we all dream of, where everyone knows everybody else’s name. Not just name, but everyone knows everyone else and can recognize the value and talents of each individual. The thought that this could ever happen in a city like London is enough to cause apoplectic fits. \Being known is much more intimate. Most of us, when we walk by Big Issue sellers or people sleeping on the street, do not directly disrespect them. But the automatic response of the diverting of eyes and the insistence of continuing walking when confronted with such individuals is ultimately the refusal to know these people and the conditions and events that have shaped them.

All of us enjoy being with people who know us, not just our names, but our likes and dislikes, qualities and characteristics, even when that other person is able to finish your sentence for you. There is a sort of relief when anyone passes a friend on the street and they stop you by name. Inevitably, it sets the rest of your day on an ecstatic level, as you recall the brief, but solid encounter of a friend chasing you down the street calling your name for everyone to hear. What we all want is a world in which people connect with us, serve each other, and recognize the need that every individual has and how he or she can help fulfill those needs. The relief comes when you know a persons name and can communicate about yourselves with each other, even if , it is a simple wave across the street.

We call them Chuggers, which is a combination of “charity” and “muggers.” They are the people who stand on the street wearing matching t-shirts and holding clipboards in an effort to get you to give them money for whatever cause they are currently representing. These people actually are not volunteers; they are outsourced. Turns out some bureaucratic genius came up with the idea of having an agency that will be willing to stand on the street and solicit donations for any cause. One day they might be collecting for starving children in Africa; the next for the Humane Society, and the next day for child refugees in Pakistan, followed that weekend by underprivileged children in India. They are not passionate about any of the issues for which they are soliciting donations. Seeking out alms to protect those in need has now become a conveyor belt of individuals able to change their opening paragraph to suit any charity at will.

Due to my electric wheelchair, for the most part I can successfully avoid Chuggers. They are always on Tottenham Court Road and I am always able to weave in and out of them with great dexterity. Today however I was not so lucky. An overly cheery blonde Chugger got in my way and asked one of the most amusing questions I have heard in a while.

“What are you doing to help children with disabilities?”

She then proceeded to specifically name my disability as what her organization is raising money for. She isn’t seeing my disability and naming it, it truly is what this organization is devoted to. I look at her; the situation is absolutely comic. One would think that I out of all people would receive a get out of jail free card as to avoiding charity markets. After all, they are supposed to be giving money to people like me not demanding it. Today I can’t resist.

“So tell me more about what it’s like to have this disability?” I ask, just testing her knowledge a little more. She is good. She has definitely memorized the pamphlet. The problem is, she is preaching to the choir, considering the fact that I’m sitting right in front of her. I can’t help but press my luck even further.

“Wow that’s awful! How do those kids even begin to cope, what a terrible situation to grow up in.”

She thinks she has me now and offers me a pen and form to write down my bank details. “I’m sorry, I can’t write”.

“You can’t write at all?” She sounds the rare combination of disappointment and surprise. This was not in her training pamphlet when she signed on to be a Chugger. “Why not?” In the UK, Chuggers cannot write down your bank details, you have to do it for them as some sort of legal privacy act. Because I can’t write down mine, she knows she is not getting a donation.

“Because I have a disability”

This explanation has never occurred to her. I have no choice at this point but to shrug my shoulders and drive away.

For most people, disabilities don’t really have a place. They don’t recognize the problems caused by having a disability until they confront someone who is fully immersed in it. We shuffle our ill and dying into homes where experts can care for them so we don’t have to face the failures of the human body which will inevitably become our own. Worse, in Western culture we seem to like it that way.

But once we get to know someone with that condition, then all of a sudden the charity name disappears entirely. It turns into the condition that “Bob” has, but he’s able to live his life anyway and make us laugh at the local pub. We don’t see the weakness of people we know even when we are standing a few feet away from them. Rather, we see them as an entire being as opposed to fragmentary conditions. This is the difference between raising money for a cause and being passionate about one. This is why I call the people who stand on the corner of Tottenham Court Road Chuggers rather than charity collectors.

As I went down the street after my encounter, I couldn’t help but think of her original question which was actually quite poignant. What am I doing to help disabled children? The best thing for kids with disabilities is to have a society which sees them not as a cause or a victim but as unique individuals capable of racing towards their dreams and being exactly who they want to be. For disabled children, the greatest gift I can give them is not from my bank account but rather, be a successful adult and refuse the easy classification as a victim in need of a specified charity. Although, maybe that’s how the overly cheery Chugger saw me. She didn’t see the disability at all until it impeded her work. Maybe all she saw was the successful adult going down the street who wanted to help in any way they can.