So ATOS is the mercenary company that does the UK government’s dirty work, throwing disabled people off welfare, telling cancer patients on chemo that they’re fit to work, killing some 32 people a week according to some estimates. It’s also the company that sponsors the London Paralympics, which understandably got a lot of people outraged. Here we have the event that celebrates disabled people overcoming their handicaps, yadda yadda and it’s paid for by the profits of the company that does its best to kill them off? That’s bound to tick any right thinking person off.
But to be honest, it makes perfect sense. The paralympics celebrates the good disabled, the ones that inspire us and make us feel good that they may be in a wheelchair but didn’t let that stop them becoming world class athletes. Those parasitic dole scum on the other hand, who have been holding up their hand to decent hardworking tax payers, those are the evil disabled, the people struggling to live their daily lives we’d rather not see, not fit and good looking or having a photogenic handicap. The Paralympics is the other side of the coin of that media portrayal of disabled people as benefit scum unwilling to work.
On the one hand we hear day in, day out about benefit cheats, we live in a media climate in which every disabled person is a cheat and treated as such, then every four years there’s a feel good media circus where we see that if they have enough will power, disabled people can do anything. What’s missing is seeing disabled people leading day to day lives: it’s either the one percent of incredibly lucky, incredibly fit top athletes, or the much much smaller group of pretend cripples. Yet most people, temporarily able or not, are neither top athletes nor fraudsters.
It’s easy to other disabled people; has anybody ever been jealous of a guy in a wheelchair, even a gold medalist in a wheelchair? If we’re healthy and able (for the moment), we tend to just ignore or exclude those who aren’t, despite the very real possibility that we ourselves will join at some point in our lives. We want to keep our ideas about disabilities simple and clean, put every disabled person in a box labeled hero, villain or victim, rather than deal with the messy reality where the guy in the wheelchair is just another bloke.
