More Glad Gaming
As a wet leftie knee-jerk liberal with delusions of peacenikery, I think the gladdest global game going at the moment is the new president-elect of the United States.* Long-time readers will remember that I was a Hillary girl but I’m a Democrat first, last and always,** and I’ll go with what we’ve got. I was willing to hope for the best with Barack. And watching him putting his team together and getting ready for the 20th really gives me hope. America may not be the pre-eminent empire of her dreams but she still has a whacking enormous amount of weight to swing in the life and future of the planet and all its populations, and I really like the idea of it swinging in my definition of the right direction.
But because actual politics pretty much bores me out of my tiny mind, I’m always looking for the odd angle on politicians: the ‘human interest’ story as it’s rather dishearteningly called***. And of the ones I’ve seen about Barack, this is my favourite. It’s from TIME so a lot of you will have seen it already: Michelle’s brother on playing basketball with his sister’s boyfriend. One of my major issues with Barack is that I’m allergic to charm. And this little essay suggests that there is a genuine human being back there, something that to my jaundiced eye was in doubt from time to time during the campaign, and, better, a decent genuine human being.
B-Ball with Barack
So much for the political. Now my favourite personal story.
A few weeks ago I was having a moan to an old friend about what I call Othering: making out some individual or group of humans to be either more or less human than you are. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: and then you’ll find it very damn hard to go to war with him, unless you have really bad self-worth problems. Everybody must get Othered about something; unfortunately it seems to be part of the way the human mind is wired. One of the reasons I agreed to this blog is to present Author as a Human Being (ahem), because I get really tired of being Othered because I write stories for a living.
I also get really tired [sic] about being Othered because I have ME. But, you know, I can pass, except when the ME is really bad. Someone in a wheelchair doesn’t have that luxury. I’m a little height-obsessive anyway–I hate being the shortest person in the room, and it gives me a touch of claustrophobia as well–so I tend to be super-conscious of wheelchairs and, never having been friends with someone who spends a lot of time in one, probably not in a good way. I said some of this to my friend, who has spent a fair bit of his professional life as an advocate for the disabled, who replied, it’s not like that. People in wheelchairs are just like you–just like you’re saying about being a storyteller and having ME.
And he sent me this story, written by someone with cerebral palsy who spends a lot of time in a wheelchair. And when I asked if I could possibly use it on the blog, he cleared it with Alex for me. And note the title (the full citation’s at the bottom): He’s not Broken–He’s Alex.
When I was about seven years old, I was firmly convinced that I was a werewolf. I had never actually undergone any physical transformation at the full of the moon, but seven-year-olds are not bothered by such trifles. The crowning touch was that my crutches acted as a second pair of legs, and although when wearing them I could never really manage a wolf-like lope, I made do instead with a sort of galloping skip. Nevertheless, it was fast enough (to me) to reinforce fantasies of running swiftly through the forest on silent paws, seeking unsuspecting prey.
The technical term for the condition of being a werewolf is lycanthropy, after the mythical Greek king Lycaon, whom the god Zeus transformed into a wolf as punishment for his tyranny. I knew the word at the age of seven, having read every book on werewolves that I could both find and understand. I was proud to declare myself a lycanthrope to everyone I met.
One day that year, my mother, my younger brother, and I attended a fund-raising boat race, the object of which was to allow wealthy yacht owners to raise money for the disabled. I was skipping around the lobby of the yacht club where the event was being held, giving long, mournful, earsplitting howls, as a proper werewolf should. Mom was over in a corner with my brother, trying to pretend that I was someone else’s child.
One of the yacht owners saw me, and she said, “Look at you, doing so well. What’s your disability, honey?”
“I have lycanthropy!” I said, beaming.
A few minutes later, she was chatting with my mother and said, “I just met your son. What a nice boy. It’s so sad that he has lycanthropy.”
Mom smirked. “Um, I think there’s something you should know . . .”
That is what happens to people who are lacking in disability awareness.
McIntosh, A. (2009) He’s Not Broken–He’s Alex: Three Perspectives. In E.B.Crepeau, E.S.Cohn, & B.A.B.Schell (Eds.), Willard and Spackman’s occupational therapy (11th ed., p. 122). Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
Happy New Year.
* * *
* And try to imagine how much I like not being George-by-extension over here, merely because I share an accent (more or less) with about 300 million other people: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/28/barack-obama-george-bush
** It’s within the realm of possibility, if the Democrats nominated a serial killer who was mean to his^ dog, I’d vote Republican. But it would take something fairly extreme to scrape this barnacle off the mossy Democratic hull.
^ Or her. But there are not many more female serial murderers than there are female presidents of the US. Or even female secretaries of state.
*** Who else reads newspapers? Are the dolphin interest stories overwritten all the human interest ones and only appear if the paper is dipped in seawater? No, wait, wet newspaper disintegrates. Okay, I’m baffled. Maybe the spider, dog and cockatoo stories are written in invisible ink over all the margins? I’ve certainly known cockatoos plenty bright enough to read newspapers, and I wouldn’t put it past Darkness. Chaos would be the one saying, Oh, news. News is boring. Let’s go bite something.
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