The case for denial; what the handicapped movement can learn from a totally normal guy.

• Author: Glastris, Paul

What the handicapped movement can learn from a Totally Normal Guy Paul Glastris, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is a domestic correspondent for U.S. News and World Report.

The great achievement of the disabled movement, a movement that seems to have reached a kind of apex, is its drive for changes in technology and public policy and public attitude that have integrated the disabled into mainstream society as never before. These changes have come at the insistence of the disabled themselves: they hunger for normality, as anyone who has ever known a disabled person can probably attest. Behind the obvious signs of progress-the sloped curbs and reserved parking spaces and reengineered public bathrooms-is a good deal of quiet lobbying and organizing. Sometimes the movement has turned to more public displays: this year's protests at Gallaudet University or the wheelchaired veterans who periodically roll across the U.S.

Forging a movement for themselves may be the only way handicapped people as a group can advance their cause. But is that also true about individuals? I don't think so. Indeed, I've felt quite strongly for a long time that there's a harmful side effect to all this group consciousness. I can try to get at my concern by stating the movement's paradoxical logic. It goes like this: the key to being treated as normal is to identify with the thing that makes you different, Or: empowerment and freedom come only if you highlight your physical limitations. Again, I think this is probably true for groups, given the way our interest-group-happy system works. But for the individual disabled person to identify with his handicap can be insidious.

The wheelchair Olympics, or "Paralympics," for instance, seem sad to me. If normality is the goal, then isn't competing as a handicapped person, against other handicapped persons, in a strictly handicapped event, exactly the wrong strategy? With a guitar, or a computer, or a chess board, or a pen, they might compete for real, against all comers, in the wider world, in the only world that matters. Out there on the basketball court, however, they prove nothing, they overcome nothing. They clearly enjoy the experience of competition; the audience chokes up with sympathy and admiration. But has the cause of normality been advanced? Not really. In the end, they don't look to me, or to millions of others, I'm afraid, like real Olympic athletes, merely like a bunch of guys in wheelchairs playing basketball.

That sounds harsh, and it is. But it's not meant as an argument against noble dreams. Nor am I insisting that"accept" their handicaps. Indeed, they've already done so. They have shown the world, and accepted for themselves, an identity: "handicapped athletes." That's just what I find so troubling.

Acceptance of reality is generally thought to be a good thing. It could be considered evasive, even psychologically unhealthy, for someone not to acknowledge that terms like "handicapped" and "disabled" accurately describe their physical impairments, if in fact they do. You are what you are, no use fighting it. But fighting stereotypes and promoting normality is what the disability movement at its best is all about. The movement undermines itself by creating new identities for the disabled (wheelchair Olympian) that are stillless than normal. The disabled who fall for this new identity risk missing out, it seems to me, on a better, fuller identity.

Let me try to illustrate with a story. It was one of those things that happens to me once every other week; had I not been writing this essay, I would never have remembered it. I left my downtown Chicago office, rode the elevator to Michigan Avenue, and walked-as, alas, so many disabled people cannot-on my own two legs, across the street to a sandwich shop to pick up some lunch. I work for a magazine, and my mind was happily engaged with facts, quotes, ideas, and sentences ftom a story I was writing. Aside from a homeless person who inhabits a sidewalk near my building, the people on the street all looked perfectly normal: women clutching parcels of overpriced clothing, construction workers eating boxed lunches, professional s in their crisp suits and raincoats flapping in the wind.

I must have looked like one of those typical young professionals to the two attractive young women sitting at a table near the door of the sandwich shop-assuming they noticed me at all. Presumably they saw a fellow in his late twenties, dressed in a suit, walk by and pick up a red plastic tray, holding it against his chest as he perused the sandwich bin. He would have had his back to them as he bent down to retrieve a chicken salad sandwich on black Russian bread, but then he would have turned around and walked towards them to the refrigerator where the beverages are kept. They'd have seen him prop the tray with the sandwich between his chest and the refrigerator while he opened the door with his left hand, when suddenly they'd see the orange juice bottle he was reaching for fall heavily onto the tray, knocking the sandwich on the floor. As he tried to hold on to the tray while backing away from the refrigerator, they would have seen the refrigerator door snap shut, pushing the tray against him and sending the orange juice bottle careening off a wall and landing in a wet crash on the linoleum floor. They'd have seen a manager walk quickly over, and while assuring him there was no problem, nothing to worry about, pick up the chicken salad sandwich and place it gently on his tray. As the young man stood by the cash register paying for his sandwich, the two young women may have noticed the way he kept his right arm rather stiffly at his side. And as he walked by them on his way out the door with his bagged sandwich tucked into his left arm like a football, they may have noticed a terrible scarring on his left hand.

I imagine the women were embarrassed for me-probably a good deal more embarrassed than I was for myself. Within 30 steps of the shop, I was back to mulling over sentences. The incident was no longer in my thoughts. A self-protective mental mechanism was at work, a trick of the mind I have trouble explaining but which is constantly operating. The image of a man with a strangely scarred hand, fumbling awkwardly with his food, is not the image of myself that I see in my mind's eye. Back on Michigan Avenue, I am back to being just another guy on Michigan Avenue, special to myself for the ideas that occupy my mind but content to know that people on the street don't give me a moment's thought or a second look.

An early bloomer

At the age of ten, I entered a great new period in my life. Our family movedfrom Kirkwood, a sleepy old suburban township in St. Louis County, where I was perpetually bored, to a new house in the unincorporated western edge of the county. Our new subdivision was surrounded on three sides by adventure: wooded hills, creeks, overgrown fields, a horse pasture, and a pond. I thought I was going to lose my mind with happiness as I began to explore the place; my mother feared for her own sanity as I started bringing home pocketfuls of snakes and requesting permission to keep them in the basement. Unlike Kirkwood, the new neighborhood was filled with boys my age, so getting enough bodies to build a fort or to play a decent game of backyard football was never a problem.

I was what you would call an early bloomer. At the age of 11, muscles developed on my back and chest and arms and legs, giving me certain advantages over my bony friends. One of the rituals of seventh grade physical education was slinking to the top of the thick rope that hung from the gymnasium ceiling; I was one of the few kids in school who could climb it like a monkey without using my legs.

I had always been a mediocre athlete, but now suddenly I was competing well in any sport I tried: basketball, baseball, and my favorite, soccer, a major sport in St. Louis. I also wrestled, and the older guys on the school wrestling squad, having noticed my strength, would often choose me for a partner to demonstrate to the younger crew how various moves and holds worked--a mixed honor that involved gening my face rubbed into the mat by upperclassmen. My brothers and I joined the swim team at the pool of a nearby subdivision. We were newcomers to the pool and to the sport, and so usually brought up the rear. But we improved with the grueling practice. At the end of the summer before eighth grade, I won a third place ribbon in the breast stroke. More importantly, I was beginning to attract the attention of the girls at the pool. Had I an ounce of confidence or a scrap of information, I'd have done something about it.

Most of my free time, however, was spent fishing on the pond, plucking crawfish from the creeks, or turning over logs in the woods and chasing after whatever crawled or slithered out. There was always something interesting to do in the woods, even in winter. On one typical afternoon in February, at the age of 14, 1 headed to the wooded hills with my buddy Dave. At the top of the highest hill was an abandoned house. It looked progressively more derelict as the years went by, and my friends and I dismantled it, sometimes to scavenge building materials, sometimes for no reason at all. Nearby were what looked to be abandoned telephone poles that once served the old house. A snipped wire hung from halfway up one of the poles and spilled onto the forest floor, and at its base was nailed a metal insignia of the local phone company. The pole smelled of pitch. Staring up at it, I wondered if the insulators at the top might not bring a few bucks; I'd seen similar-looking ones for sale at a nearby antique shop. So up the pole I climbed, an easy feat for a practiced climber like me, especially with the help of the...