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Monday, February 17, 2003I used to try to explain that in fact I enjoy my life, that it's a great sensual pleasure to zoom by power chair on these delicious muggy streets, that I have no more reason to kill myself than most people. But it gets tedious. ....But they don't want to know. They think they know everything there is to know, just by looking at me. That's how stereotypes work. They don't know that they're confused, that they're really expressing the discombobulation that comes in my wake. ..Are we ''worse off''? I don't think so. Not in any meaningful sense. There are too many variables. For those of us with congenital conditions, disability shapes all we are. Those disabled later in life adapt. We take constraints that no one would choose and build rich and satisfying lives within them. We enjoy pleasures other people enjoy, and pleasures peculiarly our own. We have something the world needs. This particular person is a lawyer and an activist for the rights of the disabled, including their right not to be put to death. Not at the end of life. Not at the beginning. She describes what it’s like to meet Peter Singer, animal rights, euthanasia, and infanticide enthusiast. Her end-analysis of the man - nice but flawed: But like the protagonist in a classical drama, Singer has his flaw. It is his unexamined assumption that disabled people are inherently ''worse off,'' that we ''suffer,'' that we have lesser ''prospects of a happy life.'' Because of this all-too-common prejudice, and his rare courage in taking it to its logical conclusion, catastrophe looms. The fact that he’s nice and that his prejudice is common should not exonerate the man from taking responsibility for the consequences of his ideas. As the author’s sister points out, lots of Nazis were nice people, too. In fact, so was Hitler. He just didn’t think Jews, or disabled Aryans for that matter, were people. He shared Peter Singer's all-too-common prejudice. posted by Sydney on 2/17/2003 07:00:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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