Leaving Treadmarkz Across the Universe

by Treadmarkz

There is not a single regular character on a single sitcom that I can think of that is in a wheelchair, unless you count “Timmy” from “South Park” which I hate to even comment on, or “Joe” from “The Family Guy” which is a cartoon. Though it is great that they made this character a police officer, there is one very cartoonish episode where Joe says he “feels useless” and decides he’d like to be able to walk so he gets a leg transplant. After the successful surgery, he decides that he only hung around with his current friends because they were lazy and he was in a wheelchair. There are so many things wrong with this entire premise, I don’t know where to start. Anyway he moves on to another group of friends, and he gets a big head about it, and his old friends, and his wife get jealous and she shoots him in until he is disabled again. The only good thing about this episode is that he learns that his life was fine the way it was.

I’m not sure if it is, again, the image that people in wheelchairs take themselves too seriously that keeps writers from putting a disabled character in a sitcom, but I would love it. Not so their would be a forum to make lame jokes about how stupid and closed-minded the able-bodied people are, not to depict the disabled as heroic survivors, and not so I can finally have a sitcom that I can relate to.

I can relate to plenty of them already and I would hope that my hypothetical disabled character would be one that the masses would relate to. That’s what sitcoms are, a little slice of life that pretty much anyone can relate to. We all have plenty of reasons to laugh at ourselves, after all. Yup, just a slice of life, and I want my slice on primetime TV, by God! The character would have to be written by a disabled person, I think, but only to avoid the potential mistakes I listed in the second paragraph. And it would have to be natural, not trying too hard to show that the character is “just like everyone else” but just there, and funny.

by Treadmarkz

There it is folks. In big bold letters. Cripple. Does it hurt anyone? No. This is a word that goes back thousands of years, and until not too terribly long ago was a perfectly noble way to describe someone either with malformed limbs, or without use of any number of their limbs. You could say it is politically incorrect, but that is all an invention of human minds. I myself have no use of my legs and I find the word “cripple” to be just fine as long as it is not used to hurt or demean, which was not its original intent.

A while back I was cutting my dad’s hair and my family and I were joking that I should go into business. But I’d have to come up with a good name for my shop. I stoicly suggested “A Cripple With a Clipper.” Why not? It tells you what you are going to see when you come through the door. Simple, no frills advertising. But it is important to remember that, as is the case with the endless titles human beings give themselves (man, woman, banker, athlete, American, dog-lover), the word “cripple” says very little when you look at the whole person. For instance, when people came this shop they’d see that I may be crippled but they should still expect an impeccable haircut, because I’m a barber.

The BBC’s OUCH! Weblog recently conducted a poll of its readers that showed respondents (some physically handicapped, some not) found the word “cripple” more offensive than “psycho” in describing disabled people. This boggles my mind! Check out the results here. Among disabled respondents, “cripple” was found to be much more offensive than “psycho” in comparison to non-disabled respondents. This really boggles my mind! Granted, we are talking about two different types of disabilities here, mental and physical, but think about it. A lot of people refer to Charles Manson, Ted Bundy and Jeff Dahmer as “psycho.” You never hear anyone say “He killed 43 people, cut them up and ate them?! What a cripple!” This shows that “psycho” is a word that people have no business using in reference to any disabled person. But the results of this survey also raises a question: Is a person without use of, or malformed, limbs really as offensive as a serial killer? The answer is no, of course.

Politically correct people try to help. “Differently abled”, for example, was thoughtfully bestowed upon people with handicaps by the US Democratic National Committee during the Reagan Administration. I wrote a post early on in this blog where I mentioned “people who decide what it is politically correct to call us.” This is exactly what I was talking about. The government telling me how I want people to describe me? No way. I am an individual, and I say there is nothing wrong with “cripple.” I do use some of the politically correct terms in this blog, but only to be understood by the general public. Of course you cannot use “cripple” for all disabilities, like the blind or deaf. And “Paraplegic” will do just fine to describe my specific case, but in terms of the all-encompassing word for the fact that I cannot use my limbs, disabled, differently abled, do not work for me. Cripple is fine.