Special Indeed

“When you hear the word ‘disabled,’ people immediately think about people who can’t walk or talk or do everything that people take for granted. Now, I take nothing for granted. But I find the real disability is people who can’t find joy in life and are bitter.”-Teri Garr

Have you ever met a parent with special needs or know of any person with special needs? May be your friend, an acquaintance or someone in your neighborhood? Have you ever pondered what their lives may be like? Or did you just shrug the thought before it could leadyou to certain realizations.
Every living being has a sense of fear and their gut instinct helps them guard themselves when it senses fear…fear of falling, fear of fire/burn or may be even fear of people. Imagine this..You are traveling by a bus. At the next stop an abnormal child with a parent takes the seat right beside you. What would be your immediate thought and the next course of action? Within a flash of a second you conclude that this child is mentally unstable and you are probably looking around for an empty seat to move away from that child. Suddenly the child has become a threat to your peace. At this moment you probably won’t mind standing in the bus throughout your journey until you reach your destination. So that once cushioned seat that you were eyeing to sit on for a comfortable journey has suddenly become a threat to life. Is it not? Well my friend not just you but probably 9 out of 10 people on that bus will do what you have done! A child/person with special needs/disability is always considered a threat and is often alienated from the rest of the society. Why? Says one person….”Oh my god! Why is he/she walking clumsily”? Says the other person…” Why is this person flapping their hands continuously? Why are they screaming”? Says the third person…”Please take this person away. I don’t feel safe in his presence”.

People with disabilities are not a threat or aliens. They are humans just like you and me, and, certainly have emotions. Some of the best people with disabilities who the world shrugged away were the ones who went on to make the world a better place. Remember Albert Einstein? The great physicist who developed the theory of relativity and gave the world e=mc2. He was considered mentally deficient by his teachers and society because he had difficulty talking, could not read until the age of 9 or 10 and was unsociable. An able bodied person during that era did not even think of this theory. So who do you think is more able? In a person with disabilities we only see what we want to see. In an able person we see what is being shown to us. The irony of life is we believe what we are made to see. No wonder it is popularly quoted ‘beauty is in the eyes of the beholder’. Let’s not consider our special friends aliens.

Let’s make an effort to understand them and help them rise and shine better. After all we have equal human rights. They deserve to live a life of dignity and respect. Let’s live for each other and take forward the spirit of humanity.