apparently.
I have noticed this before. Unless it is a story about your favourite football team having won the premiership then people don't want to know.
Add a few negatives to the mix, an orphan and a disability in this case, and people seem to be even less interested. I suppose I should know enough psychology to expect that but it still disappoints me.
There was a lovely human interest story on the front page of the Sunday paper yesterday.
I remembered the young man. He was abandoned in a shoe box at an orphanage in Vietnam. He was born without fully developed arms and legs. His jaw was fused together and his mouth was so badly deformed he couldn't feed properly. Nobody, or so it seemed, wanted him.
One person did. He was brought to this state and then, extraordinarily, a couple adopted him. They adopted all his problems too - the initial months in hospital and the years of medical treatment.
If the picture alone was anything to go by he has repaid others for their kindness in spades. His smile and that of his physically perfect young daughter said far more than any number of words.
I was briefly in our local library yesterday afternoon and I heard someone say to someone else, "That was a dreadful picture on the front page. They shouldn't put that sort of thing there. The kids found it upsetting."
And then someone else said, "Yes, it's wrong."
"Should leave that sort of thing alone," another person added.
After Saturday afternoon I wasn't willing to risk another confrontation. I didn't have the energy.
So I just said quietly as I passed, "It's a wonderful picture, full of love."
I went around into the first aisle and heard,
"She is weird."
I think I'll stay weird if it means I care about that sort of thing.
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4 comments:
Glad to meet you here in Weird - it is a lovely place.
I tried to leave a message of sympathy on yesterdays post, but the machinery went wrong. Please accept it now!
You wouldn't be our Cat if you didn't act and feel and speak this way. AND we love you just the way you are.
I'd love to meet you in real life Jean! We could talk books and knitting and all sorts of things.
That's nice of you Allison - I'll go on being me too I think
There are people who find the whole notion of disability and human frailty too confronting because, by accepting the random and vulnerable nature of it, they are also forced to acceot their own vulnerability and mortality. It's easier to turn the page and look away.
This is an attitudinal and social barrier for people with disabilities and it makes me angry. If people with disabilities have the courage to face an unfriendly world of discrimination and ostracism, then the person who would complain about the depiction of disability and disfigurement should at least have the courage and human decency to look people with disabilities in the eye instead of averting gaze and cowardly avoiding them.
I'm finding integrity harder to find in society these days. Maybe it is now becoming weord to actually have some integrity and human decency. In that case, I'd be happy to be included in the 'weird' camp too!
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