People living with disabilities wrongly encouraged to over-do it
Rick Hansen, media darling with the wrong role model
Macleans Magazine printed an obituary of a blind woman from Halifax who was profiled for her courage in rock climbing and sky diving. Her death at 31 was totally preventable except for the gung-ho role models of Rick Hansen and Terry Fox. It’s not their fault. They are as much victims of a system that won’t let people with disabilities live normally.
The media mistakenly promote these examples of physical endurance for people living with disabilities. For the disabled it becomes a life long struggle to be more than they can reasonably accomplish. Just like girls are influenced by ultra-skinny models and movie stars, people with disabilities can see Fox and Hansen as personal high-water marks.
Having a disability means the person has less capability than a non-disabled person. Blind people can’t see and those suffering from mobility problems can’t walk well. There is a balanced model of personal achievement that takes into consideration the realities of each person’s situation, not globe trotting super stars.
People with disabilities are told to adjust to their disability, accept the reality of their lives. Then role models like Fox and Hansen are held high by the media as heroes. They are showered with awards, money, fame. Politicians who are eager for publicity flock to these disability heroes. Charities like Fox and Hansen because they are great for raising millions of dollars.
How is Rick Hansen a hero? Did he save a child from a burning building? Find the cure for cancer or SCI? No he went on a pointless but media-smart wheelchair run around the world.
That’s a great image for someone in a wheelchair. You can be worthy if you endure more pain, suffering and exhaustion in pursuit of physical goals beyond the able bodied. The message is that their lives only have meaning if they excel in some physical way, the crippled flag pole sitting contest.
Terry Fox is another disabled hero. While recovering from cancer, the young man who had already lost his leg set out to run across Canada. This is something that 99.99% of the population don’t bother doing. They take a plane.
Again the message is the disabled should do an ill-advised act of endurance that likely will cause their death to gain societies acceptance. Terry Fox pushed his body beyond the limit and died in the process. He might have lived if he had let his body heal.
Sorry to burst your bubble but that is the reality of the media, the ratings driven attempt to get eye-balls in front of TV’s to sell ads for toothpaste and sanitary napkins.
I know wheelchair basketball athletes with marginal physical conditions who wrecked their health pushing themselves too far. The first time you have to use a wheelchair, the machismo image of wheelchair basketball is sold to you. Then they needed back fusion operations and become addicted to painkillers for the rest of their lives.
People with disabilities need to save their bodies from further damage but the media and society tell them to become circus freaks, proving their worth with stunning feats of achievement. A better message is to pace yourself and save your life.
The standard treatment for polio survivors was to tell them to over achieve. So we did, only to wear out our bodies 20 years too soon. My mother wisely wanted me to get a desk job which would have saved weakened muscles from further damage. To prove I was as good as anyone else, my jobs included bone wearing travel, farm labour heaving 90 lb sacks of feed, and roofing 40 feet in the air.
I remember that job. I was up on a roof, tying rafters, placing and nailing plywood with an older man in the rain one day. As I looked down, all the other carpenters were standing on the ground. Too dangerous and too high. I was up there with one good leg and bad balance trying to proving myself.
I’ve had post polio syndrome for 11 years. I still can’t slow down. I’m supposed to pace myself but the inner message of self-worth in my brain says “you’re only as good as what you accomplish.”
I worry about smoking marijuana not because it is illegal or harmful. It might make me lazy and lazy is bad. Every day I drive myself to work as hard as I can. If I hurt too much or get too tired, I begrudgingly take a nap and pain killers. But I’m not happy about it. It takes effort to take Sunday off.
The girl in Macleans was a hard worker. Despite her vision disability, she got one degree and was working on her Masters. She worked for the government and was trying to better herself.
She died when she was out partying, came home in a cab and made a wrong turn walking off a cliff. She lived on the 13th floor of a condo in an unsafe part of Halifax.
She didn’t have a seeing-eye dog because her previous one got in her way of being an over-achiever. Society told her that her worth as a blind person came from living like she wasn’t disabled.
The real heroes in life are people with disabilities who work day in day out doing their best adapting to the reality of their lives. Their family caregivers are profiles in sacrifice and kindness. It isn’t newsworthy or media sexy. It’s generally just plain old hard work and courage in the face of adversity.
Lindsey
PR is everything in these cases though: Even if Rick Hansen is only a “media darling” with a disability, the effect he had in gaining positive attention for the spinal cord injured community likely influenced the hearts and minds of, for example, the people who accepted the inclusion of disability rights into the Ontario Human Rights Code in 1989. Hansen, Fox, and others are known for extreme athleticism under difficult circumstances, but that’s not what makes them heroes – they show the ‘able’ side of disability, work to let their voices be heard, and give the able-bodied public, as well as those with disabilities, the means to change the pictures of disability in their heads.
Landry
How do you believe what you are writing? I guess I respect your willingness to stand on the opposite side of very one-sided issue, i.e. the heroism/role model identity of Terry Fox. But the transitivity of your logic is completely based off an assumption that people are incapable of recognizing their own abilities. {Terry Fox is a role model. People mimic role models. Therefore people with disabilities are going to kill themselves doing what Terry Fox did.}
The incapacity to separate one’s own abilities with the abilities of another person is a mental disorder, not the effect of praising a hero. For example, Olympic athletes are good role models. Wow, that Olympian just benched 250 lbs. Hey, I am going to bench 250 lbs. Firstly, the problem doesn’t exist in praising the Olympian for his strength, it exists in the head of the individual for not being able to differentiate the Olympian’s ability from his or her own. Secondly, the Olympian is a great role model not because of their muscular strength, its because of their inner strength, discipline, drive, etc; The failure to recognize this difference also lies on the shoulders of the aspiring individual not the media.
We constantly call the soldiers role models, but we don’t see people out patrolling their suburban streets with assault rifles. The separation is that we consider soldiers as role models of discipline not of action. We consider Terry Fox a role model of perseverance, not of physical ability. We revere his perseverance and courage and optimism, three qualities everyone should have, especially amputees.
Maybe your logic rests under the assumption that Terry Fox killed himself with his Marathon of Hope. Well, being in Medical School and knowing about cancer pathogenesis, I can tell you that Fox’s cancer recurrence was not preventable; it clearly had matastasized prior to the amputation, and the given the treatments at the time, there was nothing he could have done or not done to prolong his life.
I also guess I don’t understand why you would prefer him to stay at home, rest, and not raise hundreds of millions of dollars for cancer research with the short time that he had left.
I have more…but I just doubt, any of this is going to change the perspective of someone who wrote an article with such cock-eyed view of logic and people.
Sorry if this comes of as disrespectful, I just wished you had done more developed thinking before writing this article.
Stephen Pate
Your willingness only to consider the popular media “hero” role makes you blind to the reality of selling toothpaste and worthless “feel good” journalism. The media doesn’t want to portray the reality of disability life so it finds flag-pole-sitters, etc.
Not your point of view obviously, but a point of view. Thanks for the comment.