Spring has finally come to my neck of the woods.
The air is warm, kids play outside, forsythia and hyacinth bloom, and all the little pots of seeds I planted on the patio are showing tiny shoots of green. Today, the trees popped – the green blooms came out. All of them, all at once. They weren’t here yesterday, and they are today. Nice.
Spring means Patriots Day, which is the day that, quite a bit ago, there may or may not have been an actual battle between the Redcoats and the Minutemen, but there defintely was some sort of skirmish, and marching, and Paul Revere quite possibly had something to do with it, but also some guy called William Dawes, and a woman. I think. My school system’s version was big on the part that our particular corner played in it, (and the fact that we beat the British) not so big on things like actual facts. Anyway, schools are closed for spring break, and since it is a state holiday and lots of people don’t have to work (though lots do) they hold the Boston Marathon.
I got there early, chose a spot on the shaded side of the street, but was not early enough to see the visually-impaired runners, who go first. Then come the police cars and motor cycles, then come the mens wheelchairs, and the crowd, pressed up against the Jersey barriers and along the sidewalks of the town, go wild. They scream their heads off, GO GO GO!!! They whistle, clap, ring cowbells. The wheelchair runners tend to come one by one, although one guy seemed to be tailgating another. The women wheelchairs come next. The crowd again goes wild. The wheelchairs are shiny, low to the ground, three-wheeled. Some are powered by hand cycles, others by side cycles. GO GO GO GO!!!! YOU CAN DO IT!!!! YAY!!!!
There is a pause of a couple minutes, because the start times are staggered and, you know, they had to run a decent bit of the race before getting to this particular town. Then the elite women runners come, in a tight pack, and the crowd is crazy. Less elite women. Still crazy crowd. Elite men – whoo hoo! Clap clap clap. Yell.
After a while, though, when the more ordinary runners, the runners who are your next door neighbor, or the kid you went to high school with, are going past in thick packs, your hands get tired, so you stop clapping. And your voice gets tired, so you stop yelling so much. You yell out names – if you ever run a marathon, remember to write your name on your shirt so people can yell it. A random wheelchair user, a runner with a visual impairment goes by, I cheered more, but after a couple hours of runners going, and going, and going, they all sort of blur together, and the crowd is quieter, talking among themselves, looking out for people they know in the crowd, but considering the fact that neither I nor the people standing near me could figure out when, exactly, Lance Armstrong passed by (and we know he did), it is a very tough task to find an individual person.
And here’s the thing. Every single one of those runners was running that very difficult race, all twenty-five thousand of them going those twenty-six-point-something miles, and yet, only the elites got the biggest cheers. Only the fastest, only those with visible disabilities. I’m positive that within that race, there were many – cancer survivors, depression, domestic violence survivors, veterans – who deserved just as loud accolades, but they blended in with the pack, and so were not seen.
We see the first, we see the most visible. We do not always appreciate those who come later, though they continue to fight the same fight. We had a ceremony, decades ago, when the first curb ramp was installed in California, but we don’t appreciate the fact that towns and cities continue to put in curb ramps when needed, continue to try and bring access to their constituents. We remember Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, Ed Roberts and Charles Carr, but we forget the fact that people everywhere are still working to address the same issues that they advocated for, still pushing the same agenda of access and education. There are so many of us now, though, that we can all blur together at times, and so people get bored. They stop clapping.
The people in this race are tired. The polio survivors who led the charge for independent living are reaching retirement and PPS. Look around disability circles, and it seems like the mantle is being increasingly taken up by parents, and not by young people with disabilities themselves. I wonder, and I worry. Does my generation take the ADA for granted? With global warming and climate change, do twenty-somethings not identify anymore with the disability rights movement?
We have to keep going, even when no one is clapping. We have to keep cheering others on, because just like the marathon, disability is a universal experience, and although we may not agree on many things, we are all in the same race. We all keep running towards the same goal – access, inclusion, happiness. Parents of children with disabilities, adults with disabilities, advocates without disabilities, we are all toegether, and we need to acknowledge that fact and work to diminish the divisions in the disability community.
Spring comes, and the earth is warm and fertile, open to change, open to new growth. And someone calls your name.
1 Comment
23 April, 2008 at 10:45 am
What a great post Ekie. I’ve wondered myself some of the questions you have posed.