On People with Physical, Sensory or Psychical Disabilities
By Dean Lerner Gonzalez, Colombian National Institute for the Blind - INCI (inci@andinet.com)
"If we do not risk our sanity in an act, that experience is not worth doing."
--Gaston Bachelard.
Analysis should start from the title of this article itself as proposed in this paper. Not only as something that precedes and is proposed; but also in the sense that it opens a discussion, encouraging the pondering of words through their transit into existence and use. Quoting a philosopher: " . . . doing things with words . . . " or, better yet, as another philosopher said, the art of creating concepts.
Why not paralytics, blind, deaf and dumb, crazy, brutes, insane, cripples, diminished, infirm, cerebral palsied, confined to wheelchairs, sightless . . . ?
If we archaeologically traced the previous terms, we would be able to find how each of them was given its meaning and place within the contextual discourse of a fixed social formation of a particular time. Hence, the first group seems to respond to the lesser developed, less complex, pre-industrial societies, where people "showing defects" were subjected to laughs or compassion. These were harsh societies that distributed no concessions, and excluded those they deemed the paralytic, the pitifully blind, the deaf and dumb, the insane, stupid of crazy.
Industrial societies redrawn along the principles of political economy, where value mainly is work, begin to emphasize the unproductive character of said populations. That is why they are valueless (crippled), or they are less valuable (handicapped), or they are less valuable (diminished) at work.
On top of that, doctor-influenced societies developed a semantic universe centered on patients: infant paralysis, or poliomyelitis, cerebral palsy, Down Syndrome, paraplegia, Usher Syndrome, quadriplegia, glaucoma, Retinitis Pigmentosa, cataracts, Sclera Cornea, blindness, deafness, neurosis, psychosis, schizophrenia, etc.
Technological societies invented their own neologisms based on their own faith in technology to solve either acquired or genetic problems and make a clear reference to the lost functions that some day might be replaced by a chip designed by system engineers or be repaired, or avoided all together by genetic engineering: physical disability, hearing disability, visual impairedness, mental disability. Thus, we begin to see use of the dis prefix as meaning loss, or missing, just as it is used in disfigured, discontinuous, dyslalia, dysphonia, dyspepsia.
In countries like ours, where unequal development exists, it is common to hear all previously mentioned terms in various discourses taking place at the same point in time. Hence, thinking in that Colombia we love, without discrimination, under equal opportunities and social justice, with happiness and allowing for an equal development for all, we consider these terms by challenging what we are and transform us into what we want to be.
Therefore, we all want that in agreement with the previous principles, that instead of diminished, crippled, disabled or Disability, the first mention should be of PERSONSand then to attach what is the difference . . . within a framework of respect and tolerance, i.e., naming the limitation observed itself and openly, PHYSICAL, SENSORY OR PSYCHICAL.
Explained in Durkeheimian terms, what is at stake is not only words scripted in routine speech, but also that these words take on the solidity of reality as social fact. Hence the importance of unbalancing such discourses, of deconstructing them, displacing them, so as to dissolve the ontological being that has been loaded onto them, ending their identification with the personal essence of being, instead of what is accidental to it, a simple disadvantage, the limitation, the added negative.
We must try and find the contradictions that might allow us to diminish the negative impact by furthering the conditions to develop the Self, i.e., the vital project for those who are at a disadvantage.
If reality is to be defined, what we intend is to build social realities where disabilities are not transformed into obstacles to the acceptance of anyone having some kind of physical, sensory, or psychical limitation; where living with radical differences encourages learning about respect, tolerance, and solidarity; whereby we can understand that many things exist without being restricted to us, therefore that we are not all, that we are all confined, that we all have limits. If we always take others into account, we can surpass egotism and accept pluralism, diversity, dissent, divergence, what is not the norm, the enormous, the superseding of codes, including the genetic one, in the pact, the commitment that bounds us to restraints.
We must take the opportunity to make the acquaintance of and socialize with people with physical, sensorial, and psychical limitations to challenge our own limitations, our prejudices, our assumptions, so as to learn that our world always is smaller than what we think it is.
This radical suggestion is reserved for only the strongest, for those who without losing anything put to the test things by testing themselves, for those who came to enlarge the world, not just to corroborate it.
Dean Lerner Gonzalez is a Colombian journalist and the General Director of the Colombian National Institute for the Blind (Instituto Nacional para Ciegos - INCI). For more information about INCI, visit www.inci.gov.co
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