What's the point?

Today I've discussed this blog over lunch. And one of the questions I've got was what was the purpose of it and to whom I was writing for. And while I really love the delightful opportunity to be just spontaneous, there's indeed a purpose here. But I feel that more than a goal, like those that driven people use to set to themselves to get stuff done, the purpose here is most similar to a dream.
The interesting fact is my dream is not original at all. Maybe I could just copy and paste Dr. King's famous speech talking about his, and then in essence, my dream would be quite well illustrated. Here goes a famous part of it:



"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." I must say that in essence I also share this dream. This is a dream of equality. This is a dream related to the freedom from being treated as inferior because of an arbitrary physical characteristic that hasn't been chosen by the person at any time, and which within the noble values framework most people claim to personally uphold, shouldn't really matter anyways.


But another part of the same speech reveals a certain ambiguity regarding the very equality that is being rightfully demanded by Dr. King (specifically to the black men) in the 1963 US: "One hundred years later [slavery was abolished], the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity."


Dr. King intentionally uses the word "crippled". And although that doesn't change the fact he was one of the greatest people in the last century, this choice reveals a legitimation of yet two other instances of social exclusion. But in 1963, treating disabled people as invalid was the norm, even among the greatest of the men. The use of the word "crippled" enables him to make a key point. That racial prejudice and discrimination imposed such a heavy burden to healthy, able bodied, black men that this was leveling these perfectly capable human beings with disabled (crippled) people, keeping black American citizens from enjoying the wealth that was otherwise widespread in the country at that point in time. Again, what's implicitly claimed is that, in contrast, it's naturally fine to exclude the disabled from the same social good.


In 1963, the white male able bodied US lived a golden age of economic and cultural boom created by the country having become the center of the economic universe after WWII. Something that was accomplished primarily at the expense of poor countries through the world trade economic dynamics. And before that, through the accumulation of capital resulting from, among other things, buying and selling slaves (excluded from the status of humans at the time) to work at monoculture export bound farms. The point Dr. King is quite precisely making is that it's very unfair that black people are excluded from that American collective prosperity because their skins are darker than those from the dominant social group. He has made that claim based on collectively valid moral standards contained in the basic principles established by the constitution and declaration of independence of the USA:"When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir."


In other words, the legal framework created for ruling the country just being born in the end of the XVIII century has establish the rights for the citizens of this new country. All of them. Generation after generation. But of course at that point in 1783, that did not include black people. But then Dr. King has himself done something really similar to what the first Americans have done more that a hundred years before. In his speech he mentions "men" most of the time because it was ok to exclude women from this set of principles and certainly it was also fine to exclude the "crippled" people.


But again, I'm not trying to twist history and say that Dr. King was actually some misogynous bastard that also hated and discriminated disabled people. There are only two points I want to make with this analysis:1- Establishing an identity is key for organizing people around a common goal. Excluding other people from this particular group is very useful to forge the idea of belonging and to motivate formerly excluded people to act towards a shared larger social objective.2- This second point is longer and more complex. The theoretical leap is also wider, so hold on tight: medicalization of disability, specially after WWII, and the rehabilitation theories and practices generalized then, have neutralized a lot of the potential of disabled people to unite around common goals because it created a framework in which rehabilitation was the promise to rid the better adapted disabled individuals from "living in an island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity".


The problem is that, although rehabilitation may deliver part of this promise, it deprives disabled people from having a true natural and positive collective identity. Plus, the very concept of disability presupposes there has to be some residual losses in the ability to fully participate in society for it to manifest. Even though able bodied will generally ignore this residual effect, it will still be there to justify the lower standards of living and quality of life. It will be successfully disguised as part of the meritocracy the dominant members of society believe having established in the most noble and impartial way.


My conclusion here is bitter sweet. Maybe inequality is an innate human characteristic (although I've become a little reluctant to accept monolithic human truths since my disability medical aspect was one of them for me). Perhaps disabled people will get more equality for themselves by exploring human inequality in a socially smart way, as the black people and the LGBT community have done. That's how these two social groups hence now collective occupy a much better position, at least in the western world.


Or maybe human kind as a whole will realize inequality has become a burden too huge on itself, and despite having been highly adaptive in most of the 200,000 years we've inhabited this universe, it's time for us to create a different path towards a huge and inclusive human brotherhood.


So coming back to the target audience of these controversial essays, I'd say I'll better cover all the basis. I'll address disabled people community to foster identity and pride creation. I hope it will promote union and fighting for the rights of this specific group of people I belong to. And I'll also address the other chunk of humanity, just in case they finally come to realize inclusion will truly benefit everybody, abled or disabled.