NYT, beacon of ultra-liberal international media, has started a new column named “Disability”, where it invites the disabled to share their life stories. This is literally the only thing I have liked about NYT ever since its obnoxious campaign of lies and deceit to promote Hillary Clinton, and I mean not the column but its name – Disability. Since “disability” can’t be typo for “differently abled”, kudos to NYT for this completely unexpected act of eschewing stupid euphemisms.
The column boasts of some genuinely good pieces that inform the larger audience about the life of disabled people, but here I want to focus on the odd-one-out, a piece titled “Love, Eventually”, penned by one Ona Gritz. The piece is informative alright, if not about disability then about the free pass one gets in the name of victimhood.
The gist of the piece is that the author is semi-disabled because of mild cerebral palsy in the right side of her body. After much heartburn and empty sex, she meets a perfectly able-bodied man whom she falls in love with and gets married to. They have a kid, Ethan, but they divorce when he’s just four, and she eventually marries another man named Dan, who’s disabled himself by way of being born blind. Her life seems fulfilled after that.
Run-of-the-mill sappy romantic saga, which I bet wouldn’t make it to my blog, let alone the hallowed pages of NYT, had it not been written by a disabled person woman who leaves no stone unturned in playing up her disability every word she writes. Some of the things she gets sympathy for are so trite, stupid, and sometimes reckless, that she’d be castigated for those had she not been disabled. Let’s take a look.
“Apparently I was appealing enough to sleep with but not to be picked as a girlfriend.”
Said every girl, disabled or otherwise. Reason – men are dogs. In this case, the author confesses in the preceding sentence that her disability was barely noticeable, so men not picking her as girlfriend had nothing to do with her disability.
“Before Ethan’s birth I hadn’t understood that parenting is physically demanding work…. I couldn’t bathe Ethan safely, carry him on stairs or even sip from a water glass while he nursed if his head rested on my good arm.”
Oh, am I supposed to sympathize with that? Maybe I could if the author was disabled and retarded, but she doesn’t reveal the latter. So here’s a woman who keeps a child in her womb for nine months, not knowing she might have to sometimes lift a finger once it’s born, and in the process blithely imperils her son’s life. Imagine an able-bodied woman making the same preposterous claim – the readers will tear her up rather than tearing up.
“Hope was my first friend with cerebral palsy… I had other friends who “got me” in a visceral, finish-each-other’s-sentences kind of way. But only Hope could finish the sentences I’d never before said aloud, the ones about how it felt to live in a nonnormative body.”
Good grief. Way to manipulate one's disability to take sappy, cliched crap about “finishing each other’s sentences” a notch higher. What’s next - "we were two non-normative bodies one normative soul"?
“By the time Ethan turned 3, the physical demands of mothering had lessened… A year later, my husband and I divorced.”
The deadpan delivery of the last sentence would put Jimmy Carr to shame. The author makes not even an attempt to justify divorcing a “handsome, athletic, and crazy about me” man who takes her as his girlfriend when no one else would, loves her, cares for her, marries her, and has a child with her, except that:
“Out of hopefulness, impatience, insecurity or for a thousand other reasons, we too often rush into relationships that are poor fits for us, robbing our partners and ourselves of more promising connections. It struck me as likely that those of us with disabilities are especially susceptible to this.”
Ever heard of the art of compromise, dear Ona? Ever thought what your partner, besides your child, might have gone through owing to your recklessness? Ever wondered that a relationship between a disabled and an able-bodied person must be equally difficult for both partners, where the latter might be reminded every second that he/she ended up being a “settler”? Or is that last sentence emphasizing your disability supposed to wash off all your sins and make us bawl?
““It’s like you guys are the same person, only one’s male and one’s female,” said Ethan — not entirely as a compliment — who was 8 at the time.”
Ethan refers to Dan, Ona’s love interest post-divorce and her eventual husband, thus making clear to his mom that he was uncomfortable with their relationship. But hey, readers ought to be happy that a disabled person found love even at the cost of possibly ruining her ex's and son's life. After all, they aren’t disabled, so they should suck it up for the one who is.
“Dan (born blind) confided to me that back in high school and college, he knew how to use a cane but chose to walk without one in an attempt to blend in. Back then, he also sought able, sighted women rumored to be beautiful. When I shared my stories in kind, I was struck, just as I’d once been with Hope, by how little had to be explained.”
It’s hard to fault Ona for finding better friends (Hope) and lovers (Dan) in the fellow disabled. They would empathize with her underlying issues and all that. The same goes for blacks, homosexuals, transgenders etc. They are understood better by their kind. But at its core it’s just a case of birds of the same feather flocking together. Would the readers be as forgiving of an able-bodied person who chose to abandon a disabled partner because he/she....didn’t get it? Would a white person be hailed as a hero for forsaking a black partner because he/she couldn’t identify with, say, white guilt? I hardly think so. Seems like Ona is just as reckless, greedy and impulsive as any of us, except that most of us don't get to proudly proclaim it because, well, we have all our body parts intact.
The point of all the above rejoinders is the same – disability, or victimhood in general, gets a free pass, and the likes of Ona cash in on it. In the world of ultra-liberal media, the strong and the able are subjects of constant ridicule and shame, while the weak are glorified beyond all reasonable logic. At this rate, it would soon be about the survival of the weakest. Mothers would pray for retards to be born to them over prodigies, fitness centres would give way to fatness centres, and beauty pageants would turn into ugly pageants. There would be a race to prove oneself to be the weakest, the most wretched, and the most discriminated against. Just look at caste-based reservation demands in India for a clue.
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