The Importance of Being Shameless.

• Author: Ervin, Mike
• Position: SMART ASS CRIPPLE - Essay

My wife often accuses me of being shameless. She means the good kind of shameless. I take it as high praise. I appreciate her saying I'm shameless. I only wish it were true. I'm not nearly as shameless as I aspire to be. But I'm working on it.

The last time she said I was shameless was when we were discussing this disabled woman who wrote on Facebook about being hounded by internet trolls. They were saying that cripples like her, with our selfish government programs and civil rights laws, are a burden on decent taxpayers and ought to be locked up in institutions. My wife wondered why some people say such hateful things. I shrugged and said, "They're idiots."

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it's important to understand the root causes of things so we can treat the disease and not just the symptoms and all that. We need to know why people shame and degrade others. But that's what psychiatrists and sociologists are for. I don't have time for it. When people attempt to shame me, I just try to remind myself that they're idiots and not let them bog me down. That's what several decades of trying to become shameless has done to me.

My goal, in fact, is to achieve a state of utter and complete shamelessness, where I absorb no shame. It ain't easy. I'm sixty-one years old and still at it.

I suppose I should take a minute here to explain the difference between good shameless and bad shameless. Good shameless, to me, is drag-queen-type shamelessness--strutting and flaunting that which you are supposed to hide. It is the polar opposite of apologizing for who you are. Bad shameless is NRA-type shamelessness that will do or say anything to advance a self-serving agenda, no matter who gets hurt.

I didn't set out on a conscious quest to be shameless. It just sort of evolved as a defense mechanism. Cripples are assaulted throughout our lives by shame in many forms. It's easy to unconsciously buy into it all if you're not careful. And when that happens we're stuck in the mud because shame makes you timid. You have to develop the capacity to recognize shame for what it is and tell it to go piss off.

Being shameless is important not just for cripples. To be a powerful activist is to be filled to overflowing with that good kind of shamelessness. The more the better.

When I was a teenager, there used to be these cripple charity telethons. Thank God they no longer exist. Telethons were live television programs that were many hours long. Much like public television pledge...