An experience I'm all too familiar with myself. Spent most of my
childhood and young adulthood going through the same scenario.
People--including physicians who should know better--assume illness is
just temporary. You either get cured--fixed like a machine--or you die,
but either way there's supposed to be a simple finality to it. When
there is no such finality, then they start blaming the patient. For
physicians, a chronic illness is a challenge to their competence, and
they resent that. It often breaks up families. People often can't deal
with the lifestyle changes being around a chronically ill person can
impose on them, especially when the physicians aren't validating the
reality of that illness. The rationalization of 'tough love' is popular
in these situations... This subtle able-ism among physicians, teachers,
and indeed 'professionals' of every sort, is rife in the contemporary
culture, paralleling aspects of racism. Just recently, as I was facing
that lawsuit from the publishers, both their attorneys and the judge
accused me of not really being disabled because--I kid you not--I wrote
too well for a disabled person. The attorneys actually submitted
transcripts of things I wrote online as 'evidence'. This would seem
outrageous except that, long ago, when I first applied for SSI
disability income, the judge overseeing that case denied my application
for exactly the same reason! Have you ever noticed how many people
compulsively speak to those with obvious disabilities with the sort of
tone they use when they speak to children? They do this to the elderly
too. There's a common--almost instinctual--assumption that the disabled
must be mentally disabled as well. If you don't fit these
preconceptions, well, how can you really be disabled?
Our culture remains rather primitive in many ways.
On 1/15/18 1:29 AM, [email protected] wrote:
Subject:
[P2P-F] Fwd: Learning to Be Sick by Rabbi Elliot Kukla
From:
Michel Bauwens <[email protected]>
Date:
1/15/18, 1:28 AM
To:
p2p-foundation <[email protected]>
a beautiful text, well worth reading,
Michel
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: *Tikkun* <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
Date: Sun, Jan 14, 2018 at 10:49 PM
Subject: Learning to Be Sick by Rabbi Elliot Kukla
To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
--
--
Eric Hunting
[email protected]
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