The Rick Hansen Wheels in Motion at Old Home Week was PEI’s return to disabled as freak show.

Updated –  The Old Home Week event venue is inappropriate and insensitive.

For one hundred years from 1840 to 1940 the freak show was a popular form of entertainment. Freak shows displayed people who were for the most part disabled and who looked different from the mainstream of society.

“Today the same shows would be considered unacceptable and cruel, or as one disability rights activist put it, “the pornography of disability.” DisabilityHistory.org

Why did the PEI Canadian Paraplegic Association putting on their fund raiser at Old Home Week?

Old Home Week is a great country fair complete with carnival, horse racing, quilt competitions and livestock judging. I like to go and take it in but I don’t want to be on display. It is the perfect model for the old time freak show. We become the objects of fascination.
Rick Hansen Wheels in Motion is usually held in a quiet parking lot. In Toronto they held it in a park near Lake Ontario. They didn’t hold it at Canada’s Wonderland, or Ontario Place or during the Canadian Exhibition.

People with disabilities are not society’s freaks.

“Oh look, he’s in a wheelchair. There’s a girl with a big head. Look how funny he looks mommy.”

We will not be the amusement of the crowd at the carnival.

The organizers of Wheels in Motion want to make a lot of money. They are insensitive to how people with disabilities feel. We don’t want to look different. We’d like to look the same as everyone else but we don’t. Most people with disabilities have adjusted to the difference but the sensitivity is always there.

Generally people understand that people with disabilities want to be accepted. Society no longer tolerates the harassing behavior that hurt the disabled in the past. So how did the leadership get it wrong this time?

The crass and insensitive decision to put the fund raiser at a carnival reminds me once again why the disabled are fed up with able bodied people running their lives.

Unless you are disabled, there is no way you can understand the disability life. Some professionals are compassionate or have received training to demonstrate empathy and compassion. However, there are many in government and the non-government organizations that do not show compassion for the disabled in making decisions.

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For example, the PEI Advisory Council on the Status of Women or any other women’s organization would not tolerate male leadership. Not for a second: they know men just don’t understand the female experience. This freak show decision by the leadership at the CPA demonstrates one more time why we dislike the paternalistic attitudes and decisions of leaders in the disability community who are by and large not disabled.

This event is being promoted by Myrtle Jenkins Smith who is also with the PEI-CPA. I simply cannot believe they made this decision.

First published August 2008. Despite the howls of protest at the time, the PEI CPA and Rick Hansen have not repeated this offensive event.