A Less Acknowledged Prejudice

I was just in grocery store with my mother, and some of the people she works with. While in the store there was a middle aged man in a Freedom to Marry shirt, shopping without a second glance from anyone, people of all ages and people of all ethnicities. In particular, there was a young Hispanic woman with her Caucasian daughter. None of these people garnered a double take, or sneer, and the Hispanic woman and her daughter even got a big smile and wave from the woman who moved easily out of their way in the narrow aisle.

But the people my mother and I were with seemed to be a different story. My mother works in a group home for disabled adults. We were shopping with two of her clients today. One of them I don't know very well, but doesn't seem overly violent, and is generally quiet and well-behaved. He is, however, rather obviously disabled, because his facial structure and movements are off. The other man is one my mother and I have known for just over a decade. He is incredibly kind and peaceful, and not at all taken to outbursts. He is merely very, very autistic. And his posture and manner of speaking make this rather blatant.

In the pasta aisle, the same woman who waved and smiled sweetly at the Hispanic woman and her daughter, who didn't bat an eyelash at the Freedom to Mary man, glared and waited for my mother and I to move my mother's clients out of her way. She looked at us with such complete disdain. And we encountered this through out the store. One man moved to a different, longer, line when he saw them. People skirted around us like being disabled was the flu or something else they could catch.

It made me so unspeakably ill to see people acting like that. Just because someone is a little bit different, a little slower, doesn't know how to act, just because something went wrong when they were born, or something was off in their genetic code, doesn't make them less of a person. It doesn't make them some contagion to be avoided. It doesn't make them the butt of all of your jokes. Just because they don't show their feelings the same way you do, and just because you think they're too stupid to understand you, doesn't mean they don't get hurt.

I've been around disabled people frequently sense I was about ten. The summer before I started high school I worked in my mom's classroom all through summer school. And those kids are some of the sweetest people you'll ever meet. And sometimes I forget that not all people have the exposure to them that I do, and I hate seeing people through them sideways glances and walking around them in the halls, and generally trying to pretend they aren't there.

People are people, no matter what is different about them, be it their size, gender, orientation, race, or if they have a mental disability. And the fact that this prejudice in our society is generally brushed off as a non-issue is disgusting.