Although Aaron Miller’s attempt to bring the MSU community’s attention to the challenges faced by people with disabilities in this country and on this campus is well motivated (“Memories of Sept. 11 help to appreciate people with disabilities,” SN 9/6), his appeal to an extraordinary catastrophe and the extraordinary response to the following devastation as an apt metaphor for the overall disability experience is both dangerous and all too common.

The disability rights movement is based on the premise that the experience of disability is ordinary.

There is nothing automatically heroic in living with a disability, and having a disability does not require that one’s life must be some sort of superhuman attempt to scale mountains of adversity. I may be a disabled woman, but in my everyday life I perform no heroic feats to “overcome” my disabilities.

It’s true they are constantly present, affecting how I interact with the world - how I work, play, speak and write - and the longer I live with them, the more I learn to adapt. But when it is implied my life is automatically more distinctive or heroic simply because of that, I take offense.

I live with my disabilities. I do not “rise above” them, and I question the entire premise that people with disabilities must bravely “rise above” them.

Stating that people “rise above” their disabilities implies that disability is necessarily a dehumanizing experience, one that requires super-strength to withstand, and justifies the inclusion of people with disabilities by implying people possessing such strength are therefore important enough to recognize as full members of society.

But the experience of disability does not need to be some sweeping drama to provide a set of viewpoints worth including; in fact, it is their very ordinariness that makes them so important.

The point of recognizing and including people with disabilities is that we are as human and as valid as anyone else, and because of that (and neither in spite of nor because of disability) we have a right to participate on the same level as any other member of society.

Until people with disabilities are seen as people with the same flaws and foibles as everyone else, then 12 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, we are no closer to truly accepting people with disabilities as an integral part of society.

Molly M. Conley
interdisciplinary humanities senior