A Reader's Response

After linking this blog to a co-worker's Facebook page, I got more than I expected.

The following is a response directed towards the NYT article post from last Thursday. Note: This is coming directly from the Facebook link, it has not been edited or changed!

-- Ann Patterson, San Francisco
You asked, so I'm sharing my personal experience as a disabled person. Yes. People who live in areas that are high crime...which tends to be because those are the cheap apartment areas, too, get clobber quite often.

And disabled people who take public transportation and who are slightly slower than the flow of foot traffic are more likely to get clobbered....and this is not for the purpose of robbery or anything like that, its just because SOME people need to make other people "less" in order to feel good about themselves. And this is not limited to disability...just recall you last run-in with the boss at work.

I've been disabled since I was a baby so I know all the ways that slightly more crazy people do this stuff. I've always defended myself when attacked, sometimes even to the point of purposefully making the original attacker utterly terrified of disabled people. I'm thinking in particular of one incident where a young woman (30 years my junior) decided to try to kick me to the curb so, with one arm, I flipped her over my shoulder on to her back and kicked her back, once. A few minutes later, I got on another bus, and the woman was there, and she started screaming. I laughed. Not because it was funny, but because I defended myself quite adequately...enough so that I don't think that she will ever raise ANY limb to another human being.... Read more

I have been advocating for equal access since I was three when some elitist dance teacher refuse to allow me to participate in her class. ALL of the 3-year-old kids in that class were as spastic as I was. But this teacher had her mental health problems.

The basic problem is that disabled people, when they are discussed out of their own earshot. by 'able-bodied' folks are labeled as "less".

But those who would attack people with mobility disabilities need to understand that when one has lifted one's own weight for approximately 17 miles of "walking" per day, these people are so strong from that experience that, by comparison, people without disabilities are disabled.
(I won a lot of arm-wrestling money in bars in my college years on this basis of this)

The final thing that I want to say about this is: judges should not see the act of clobbering a disabled person as solely a criminal act. They should see it as something that REQUIRES effective mental health incarceration. Because, in my experience, doing something like this is an "entry level" crime.
Y'all know the kind of people who torture cats and then kill dogs. The kind of people who harass the disabled at work and then "go postal" for no discernibly good reason.
Criminal justice will never truly be justice until it recognizes the mental states behind the discrimination against all 'special' groups of people. It happens every day, every minute. And YOU could be one of those people.

Work on your problem, please.--

Please refer to the comment section below for my personal ongoing commentary and other comments from Ms. Patterson.