Disabilities?!

While physical and/or mental handicaps can create complications in someone's life, people with disabilities should be treated as on the same level as people without disabilities and should be viewed as people too. In class this week, we read "Disability" by Nancy Mairs. In it, she emphasized the importance of "[inserting] disability daily into our field of vision" (Mairs "Disability"), but I partially disagree. Instead of emphasizing and actively noticing handicaps daily, people should instead simply accept handicaps as a part of peoples' lives that has no bearing on their value as a human.

Even though Nancy Mairs believes in emphasizing disabilities, she also gives many reasons why it should just be received without stress. For example, she shows how she is a normal woman, saying that she "[drives] a car, [talks] on the telephone, [gets] run in [her] pantyhose," (Mairs "Disability"). Like Mairs, people with disabilities lead perfectly normal lives; their impairments do not prevent them from being human, nor do they influence a person's character. Unlike accepting disabilities, highlighting their importance only serves to cause problems. By stressing how relevant such complications are, society creates the idea that disabilities are 'special'; instead, by accepting disabilities as a normal part of human life, society fosters the idea that disabilities do not detract from a person's character and are a common part of human life.