A word on parents

Maybe I'll just state the obvious here. Still, the obvious must be said more often than not.

I've come a long way in understanding who I'm today in the light of my own history. It took more than 30 years for that to happen, so by no means I´m talking about something easy or simple to do.

The current life I have is the concrete base for every possible criticism I may have on educating disabled children. But this is done as a means to spread knowledge, not for condemning the actions or the intentions of my parents, which I´m absolutely positive, were the best of the best when struggling to do the right thing during all these years.

I want whoever reads these texts to find reasoning and insight. Emotions I often share are here only for the sake of illustration. Raising kids is hard. Raising disabled kids is even harder and I´d have to be very naive or ill-intentioned not to recognize that and give my parents the due credit.

My experience provided me with great learnings about that education issue. Most importantly, and I feel I have the duty to echo it, is this extra hardship is not contained in disabled people or their parents. The issue at hand is just another form of social injustice and exclusion with a medical twist. Medical conditions are often confused with or taken as a reason for social exclusion. But there's currently little doubt exclusion is predominantly an exogenous phenomenon.

Thus, as with all the other forms of social exclusion, there has to be a collective fight against it. Disabled people and their parents don't have any interest in being inspiration to others. They want and deserve everything everybody else wants and deserves.

Furthermore, inspired able-bodied people can even be more harmful than those openly prejudicial because they undermine disabled people motivation to fight back.