Work

I’m currently taking law classes and this semester is Tort Law, which is all the negligence, slip and fall, accident stuff. It’s a lot more than that too! A huge subject. As I read my textbook last night I felt rather furious about how suing for injuries works. If you get injured, then you find someone to blame, and you try to get money from them. Kind of makes me feel sick.

I know we punish people in this society with money, with taking away money, but I wish there was a better way.

The thing that upsets me is the whole thing is designed to squeeze as big a payout as possible by playing on people’s pity (for a disturbingly accurate portrayal, see the beginning part of the movie A Civil Action). It is a huge step backwards for disability rights. The lawyers use every clishe they can think of to make the ignorant people on the juries believe that this person’s injuries have ruined his life and he’ll be unable to work, and he’ll suffer, suffer, suffer…

I’ve known high-level quads with great jobs, better jobs than I’m qualified for. So, it’s hard to convince me that someone can’t work.

I find it important for people to work however they can because it provides a sense of purpose in life. If you just take money and do nothing, then you’re marinating in self-pity. Most people aren’t afraid to say “Get a job, don’t be lazy.” But they don’t say it to people who have disabilities. Why not? If you’re going to say it to one group of people, say it to everyone. I had dinner with an old friend last weekend and as we talked I realized that he honestly believed that a person in a wheelchair can’t work. At all.

That image needs to change! It’s because people have that impression, that someone like Martin Harty can say, “…the mentally ill, the retarded, people with physical disabilities and drug addictions – the defective people society would be better off without…I wish we had a Siberia so we could ship them all off to freeze to death and die and clean up the population.” People need to stop believing that having a disability makes someone useless!

My belief is that people who are disabled should be treated the same as anyone else because they are the same as anyone else. But if you want to be treated like it, act like it. No one respects someone who takes money from the government or from a lawsuit payout and doesn’t do anything with her life. Some will be angry about it, others will pity her, but no one respects it.

I realize that it is difficult to get a job, but that’s not really what it’s about. It’s important to try, important to find at least a passion, and to attempt to be a productive member of our society, part of the community with a role to play. I don’t believe that anyone is too disabled to do something worthwhile for the larger community. Be passionate about something!

This is why it makes me uncomfortable to read my textbook. It feels like it suggests, that law in general suggests, that once you have a serious disability, the only thing you can do is blame someone for it and get as much money as possible, then sit around and be an object of pity for the rest of your life. Yuck.