In the wider disability community, it is certainly not acceptable to consider persons with any kind of disability "broken" and in need of fixing. For those of us with unfixable disabilities, that would leave us "broken" forever. No one wants to think of themselves as broken. Yet everyone of us has some sort of disability. Some of us are better at fixing cars or cooking than doing higher level math. Some of us have great eyesight or super hearing or are fantastic athletes, or need glasses or hearing aids or canes or walkers. Some of us can perform great music but are terrible dancers.
Americans are very double minded about what "normal" means. Our media certainly projects the idea that "normal" is a person who has full use of all their physical attributes - two legs, two arms, two eyes, two ears, two kidneys, one heart, two lungs, etc., and has no diseases like diabetes or cancer or even hay fever and is highly attractive besides. If our teeth aren't straight we have to have orthodontics. If our feet aren't straight we need orthotics. But what about our mental capacity, emotional capacity, spiritual capacity? We measure our kids aptitude at academics from the day they enter kindergarten. Do we give the same amount of attention to their artistic ability, or their compassion for others, or their fiestyness to fight for what they believe is right?
In the medical community, however, "fixing" people is what they do. We had a well known and well loved physician talk at our conference last summer, and he spoke a lot about progress in preventing what all of our children already have - blindness or visual impairment! How do our kids see themselves, when others around them are talking about "what they have" as something undesirable?
A lot of press has been given recently to a 13-year-old girl from the Grand Rapids area who faces amputation of one of her legs in the near future, and how she has been playing basketball and is producing artwork with the leg and foot she will soon no longer have. Will she be less of a person when she has only one leg? If she loses the other leg to this disease process, will she be even less of a person? Of course not. But she may never be treated with the same respect as others her age, not because she is losing a leg, but because she also has developmental delays. Her brain isn't "normal". Her personality isn't "normal". Her face, and facial expressions, aren't "normal". Americans particularly are disabled in their ability to think outside the box when it comes to health, well-being and personhood. This young lady is a wonderful person in her own right, regardless of all of the challenges or differences she has.
I think we are fooling ourselves if we think that people with disabilities are "normal". We should not deny a new parent's grief when they discover that their child cannot see or hear or walk or has suffered brain damage. Grief is a completely "normal" emotion when faced with the uncertainty and challenges that such disabilities bring with them. But we are fooling ourselves even more if we think most of us ARE "normal". All of us have had to fit -or not fit - into a niche in society, learned how to use tools that don't really work for us, learned to do things we don't like to do, learned to do things we are not good at. Those of us who get to do the things we are good at and love to do are the ones who are truly blessed, and that should be our goal for all of us - and our children - to create a truly gifted and creative society - a society that can celebrate and find a place for everyone, whatever their attributes, gifts and challenges are.
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