Excuses, excuses

21 October 2008 at 4:57 (Accessibility, Advocacy, Inclusiveness, Invisible disabilities, OMG, Physical impairments, Rants, Work / Employment)

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS CUSSING.

If such righteous indignation will damage your precious shell-like ears,
then ye’d best hie off somewhere else.

“Who they hell are you to complain?”

“Everyone else is thrilled to have such crap circumstances.”

“But that’s the way we’ve always done it.”

“We’re treating everyone ‘fairly’ by giving everyone the same crappy environment.”

“Everyone else just sucks up and copes with the crappy environment, or doesn’t use it. You’re just being whiny and asking for special favors if you don’t, too.”

“If you try to modify your crappy environment to make it more usable, then everyone else will want to do that, too, and we can’t have that kind of thing going on.”

Okay, in real life the stupid excuses we get are not phrased so blatantly.  There’s usually some kind of artificially-flavoured-and-colored fluffy nonsense-phrasing hiding the real meaning.  That, or the excuses aren’t even given directly, but phrased indirectly with dismissive facial expressions, gestures, trite homilies, or vague references to (sometimes nonexistent) business regulations.

Amazing, isn’t it?

Or, perhaps not.  Not amazing, because such responses are alarmingly common.  Amazing because the sheer idiocy of these excuses threatens to melt one’s brain into a gooey mess of neural apoptosis.

Here we are, listening to someone else giving us excuses that in some way acknowledge the fact that the environment is crappy.  It was designed crappy from the start. Despite the many thoughtful improvements that have been publicly documented for creating better and more accessible environments, the initial architecture and resulting construction of many office and classroom setups continue to run on the default setting of inertia-by-tradition.  That’s the way we’ve always done it.

Even trying to protest the inherent problems, and self-advocate to get some kind of marginally useful exceptions are seen as outrageous behavior.  How dare anyone complain!  How utterly ungrateful! What selfishness!

After all, they can’t let anyone get uppity and think they deserve something special.  Next thing you know, everyone will want more comfortable and functional environments.  They would actually have to spend time and energy discussing things with employees and students, and come up with alternatives, and implement them, and that’s just too much trouble!  It’s just easier and more efficient to pretend that everyone is happy, and that everyone works best when treated as replaceable and identical cogs in the corporate or educational machine.

Furthermore, the greatest thing about the dismissive “fairness” excuses is that they put the blame back on the person requesting accommodations.  The excuses even let the rest of the people around know that the squeaky wheel* is a suitable target for sour-grapes derision.  Why, the powers that be don’t even have to institute or maintain the excuses for denial — everyone else is often happy to squelch “special requests” because of their own beaten-down spirits and internalised poverty of social generosity.

Holy shit, but working against socially-sanctioned discrimination is such hard work.  It’s like swimming upstream, or fighting fog, or shoveling the walk while it’s snowing.

So here’s a toast to everyone out there who does their part — no matter how small or inconsistent — to keep unbuilding physical and social barriers, and keep prodding others into the 21st century.  Because damnit, this is where we LIVE our lives.

* You don’t have to use a wheelchair to be a squeaky wheel.  But as a student once noted, it does make it easier to run over people’s toes, “Oops, sorry, we really need sufficient aisle space around here, don’t we?”