Chez PLJ

I’ve recently been introduced¹ to a scathingly funny blog called “Smartass Cripple”, by Chicago writer Mike Ervin, a quadriplegic who is, yes, very much a smartass. He is not one to get sanctimonious when writing about disability issues: He’s just as likely to take wickedly nasty potshots at himself and his “fellow cripples” as he is at Oprah, politicians, or the usual satirical targets. Needless to say, his blog is defiantly politically incorrect, occasionally juvenile, as well as filled with f-bombs and other strong language. Reader be warned.

But for all of his potty-mouth, Ervin brings up interesting and humorous takes on disability, unhampered by the need to feature uplifting stories about triumphant handicapped people who’ve succeeded despite adversity (cue the violins). Ervin’s columns often deal with the more offbeat details of disability, like how the length of one’s “independence stick” (a pointer that all the wheelchair kids at his old school used, enabling them to press elevator buttons) denoted how handicapped you are, and thus, how cool you were. This is the kind of snarky attitude that sadly is in short supply among publications/columnists on disability issues.

Ervin’s latest post is a good example (all quotes below are from this post.)

Whenever I go shopping and I see cheap shit made in foreign countries for slave wages, it really pisses me off. Those people are taking our goddam jobs from us! In America, cripples are the ones who are supposed to be making cheap shit for slave wages! It’s a grand tradition!

Ton of cripples still work in sheltered workshops. Whenever I see a wood doorstop I think about all the cripples who work in sheltered workshops because making wood doorstops seems like the kind of job a sheltered workshop would have its cripples do. A cripple cuts a block of wood down the middle kitty-corner and presto, two wood wedges. And then the cripple gets paid something like two cents per wedge.

This made me think (and not kindly) about the high school that Jon might’ve gone to starting this year. The Developmental Delay program at Monarch Park C.I. seemed to consist largely of kids sanding and painting woodwork in a workshop. This might be perfect for some kids, but it is absolutely unsuitable for Jon, being at the same time too challenging (because of his visual difficulties) and not challenging enough (mentally). The fact that they didn’t seem to care much that it took months—months!—for some kids to acclimatize to the place also rather appalled us.

Put me on a doorstop assembly line and I’d be a fuck up too. I’m sure Stephen Hawking couldn’t make a damn doorstop if his life depended on it. Why not take a little time to find out what a person does well and get them a job doing that?

Admittedly, the Monarch Park DD kids were doing other useful and varied jobs around the school as well (delivering periodicals to other classes, selling baked goods), but the overwhelming impression we got from our visit was negative—an indelible vision of all these wheelchair kids crammed into a woodworking sweatshop.

This underscores something I’ve worried about for the last few years, and as Jon gets older the feeling of dread gnaws a bigger and bigger hole at the pit of my stomach: Will Jon ever be able to work? How will he find work? Will his combination of disabilities preclude him from finding anything meaningful to do—most “successful” people with disabilities seem to have disabilities in either motor skills or mental ability, but not both. And throwing visual disabilities into the mix? Oy. Will it be “real” work or a “two cents per wedge” type situation? It’s less that I care about whether or not he can ever financially support himself—I’m resigned to the likelihood that he will not. Rather, will he be able to work at something that he’s reasonably happy with? Something that gives him a reason to get out of the house for a few hours, away from his tiresome parents?

Ervin goes on to tell of a guy with Tourette’s Syndrome suing an ex-employer under the Americans with Disabilities Act because he was fired from his job as a greeter. He lost, because obviously store greeters—disability or no—can’t make rude comments about customers. But Ervin correctly points out:

…[W]ho the hell is the Rhodes Scholar genius who decided to make him a greeter? Why didn’t someone sue that person for being an idiot?

Coincidentally, Jon’s teacher recently suggested that a possible job that Jon might someday be able to do is Wal-Mart greeter. Our reaction was a rather stunned, “huh,”—it was literally something that had never crossed our minds before. And then, “damn—maybe some day we’ll actually have to like Wal-Mart!”

1 Via the always edifying tweets of Roger Ebert, who is truly an indispensable Twitter resource.↩