Owing to the fragmented nature of my thoughts — the train of thought keeps getting uncoupled, so to speak — I’m taking a leaf from the book of our opinion content editor and writing a column in several parts.
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How do disabled people manage to attend UW-Madison? This campus is hard enough to navigate with two good legs and five acute senses. (Not, I suppose, that taste comes into play when most students go to class; if anyone out there is licking buildings to see if they taste like math, I don’t want to know about it.)
Maybe it says something about my level of empathy that I only started wondering this after an accident that will have me using crutches for a paltry few months. I mean, disabled people have been here all along.
That aside: From my admittedly limited experience, I have learned that being semi-disabled on this campus — and let me draw upon the linguistic facility painstakingly honed in many English classes — really sucks. I fully expect to die of a skull fracture once it snows (it doesn’t help that I was a klutz to begin with).
There are the uneven sidewalks with cracks big enough to wedge a crutch tip into. There are buildings that I swear have no doors at street level. There are newspaper offices that can only be reached via a long and somewhat-terrifying staircase.
There are the goddamn elevators in goddamn Van Hise that don’t serve floors two through five. There are people dressed as Santa Claus on Halloween who yank other people’s crutches out from under them. (Ho ho ho yourself, asshole.)
Sorry about all the profanity — it’s the lazy columnist’s fiery rhetoric.
Of course, there are wheelchair ramps everywhere on campus — most likely because they’re required by law. They’re actually harder to navigate on crutches than a couple of stairs would be, but, I imagine, still much easier than stairs for a person in a wheelchair. So that’s one good thing.
Still, if I were permanently disabled, I think I’d go to some little college where all classes take place in three buildings across the street from your four-story residence hall (with elevator, of course), and there’s nary a hill or piece of traffic to be found.
Where it doesn’t snow or rain, and all your professors are former GQ models or standup comedians, and the school motto is “A High-Paying Job Before You Graduate Or Your Money Back!” and …
But what if you have cerebral palsy and want to study chemical engineering in one of the best programs in the country? Camelot College is hardly what you’re looking for. So you’re left to choose between navigating this campus and letting your disability trump your dream.
I imagine that’s how disabled people manage here: it’s either that or let their disability dictate everything about their lives.
I have the option of ceaseless grumbling and hating every moment of having crutches; at worst, I’ll ruin several months, drop my GPA a little and lose a couple of friends by the time my knee heals. I can wallow because this is all temporary. If your disability will be around your whole life, wallowing must come at much too high a cost.
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A trick to remember: English words often follow the pattern of their endings. So just as “man” is singular and “men” is plural, “freshman” is singular and “freshmen” is plural. All right, everyone?
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If a genie offered you the gift of any ability, would it be better to pick something really amazing that no one else can do, or something really mundane that everyone else can do and you can’t? Is it better to become an impressive freak or to stop being a humiliated freak?
To put it another way, is it better to stand out or to fit in? Except when I put it that way, I can’t imagine anyone but cult members and the high school A-list saying, “Fit in! Hooray conformity!”
Personally, if confronted with a genie, I’d have to flip a coin to decide between the power to read minds and the ability to flirt. Or maybe I’d ask for both in hopes that the genie would be charmed by my honesty and give me an extra wish.
Come to think of it, genies are a temperamental bunch. I’d probably end up with donkey ears and no wishes at all.
Jackie May ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in English.
