Disability
Normal or Abnormal
Individuals afflicted with some type of disability have been a part of our culture for decades now but majority of disabled people are still viewed as abnormal. Nancy Mairs, a forty-three-year-old woman crippled with multiple sclerosis, wrote an article entitled Disability in 1987 that was first published in the New York Times. Mairs makes a valid point by stating, “Achieving integration, for disabled and able- so my bodied people alike, requires that we insert disability into our field of vision: quietly, naturally, in the small and common scenes of our ordinary lives” (15). Mairs once asked a local advertiser, “why does the media repeatedly select individuals who have no disability but rarely select people with disabilities to be in the spot light” (14)? The advertiser replied, ‘We don’t want to give people the idea our product is just for the handicapped’ (14). In reality, advertisers do not want their viewer’s physical capabilities to feel threatened by viewing others who may have some type of disability. The disabilities or
impairments in which the general population has the hardest time accepting are those that are physical.
One of many physical disabilities that our society has a hard time accepting is blindness. According to Renuka Savant, blindness can be broken down into three categories: complete, night or color blindness (1). I can relate to individuals with this disability. Although I am not completely blind, I do not have twenty-twenty vision. I have a disability defined as night blindness. For example when I drive at night it is very difficult for me to see. Ronald L. Gilardi states, “a person can either be blind from birth or something tragic can happen during his or her lifetime to bring about blindness” (1). A tragic situation was the cause for my night blindness. Being blind from birth or becoming blind during one’s life time is a condition easy for others to notice. For instance, one might be...