The first thing that struck me after I became paralyzed and wandered out into the world for the first time was that I didn’t see anyone else in a wheelchair out there. On my first trip to the Westside Pavilion mall in West LA, I rolled up and down the shiny corridors and in and out of every pet shop and Banana Republic desperately looking for a another friendly crip face, and found none. I started to think I was in the middle of a sci-fi movie where aliens had kidnapped all the disabled people for some kind of mad intergalactic experiment and I had been somehow overlooked. I was the last one on earth left rolling! It felt that lonely.

To this day, fourteen years later, I make it a habit of looking around for other wheelchairs and the like whenever I’m out and about and rarely see more than one a trip, if that. I can always go to an Abilities Expo event or even a meeting of our local transverse myelitis support group and rub wheels with other users, but that’s different. That’s not everyday life – those are isolated group activities.

If there are 5.6 million paralyzed people in America, not to mention 50 million plus citizens with some form of disability, where the hell are they? When I throw out those stats around my non-disabled friends, they politely nod and assume that I’m exaggerating (again). The only wheelchair user most of them see is me. Compare that 5.6 million to the Wikipedia estimate of the American Jewish population: 5,128 million. Or the American Korean population; 1.4 million. I promise you, wander around any big city in America and five will get you ten that you’ll spot more Koreans than wheelchairs, canes, or zippy three-wheel scooters.

The disabled in America are invisible. They (we) live in a disability ghetto. It’s not a geographic ghetto like the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto pre-World War II or like Harlem in New York or Hough in Cleveland. The powers that be don’t pack all the disabled in a rundown area across the tracks and call it Cripple Town. The segregation and isolation is much more sly and more insidious than even that.

First of all, there is a historic tradition of keeping the disabled out of sight. Before World War I, you rarely saw one of us in public. It was too unnerving for regular folks. Assuming we survived infection, a big if, we were kept at home or on the farm – remember, in 1920, over a third of all Americans lived on farms. Or we were institutionalized, often for life, in places with ghoulish names like “House of St. Giles The Cripple.”

Much has changed in the last ninety years, of course, but the level of comfort that “normal” people feel around someone with CP or a functioning quad has probably not risen all that much. It’s one thing to see Lt. Dan with his digitally amputated legs in “Forrest Gump” paling around with the developmentally disabled Forrest Gump. It’s a whole other gestalt to interact with a real-life double amp down at the local Starbucks. Laws, personal rights, medical advances, support and advocacy groups, access to school, work, and transportation – a hell of a lot is better from the perspective of a person with a disability these days. But any form of large-scale integration a la African-Americans, Jewish Americans, or even gay and lesbian Americans has yet to occur. The disabled largely remain out of sight, out of mind, and in the dark.

There are probably a hundred good reasons for this. A huge part of the disabled population is over 65, for instance, and simply prefers a sedentary lifestyle. (Don’t believe those Centrum Silver “It’s Great to Be Silver!” ads – for many, it ain’t so great.) Many disabled are low functioning and genuinely need a highly-structured institutional setting. And maybe a big chunk of highly functioning people with disabilities simply prefer to live and work at home; they find social connections on Facebook or in ways other than waiting in movie lines down at the Cineplex.

But my own experience tells me that a large part of this social isolation is attitudinal. Many of my disabled brethren, including myself for a very long time, are shy, hyper-sensitive, and socially awkward. They are leery of social encounters with people who don’t already know them and accept them as individuals. Of course the typical reaction of the non-disabled who they might encounter is equally shy, hyper-sensitive, and socially awkward. They’re worried about saying the wrong thing and being snapped at. So these good people generally kill you with kindness and can’t wait to get away from the discomfort of being around you.

grew up in a small town in Oklahoma in the 1950’s where black people, unaccustomed to being integrated into mainstream life as the civil rights movement took hold, often either avoided white people all together or felt they had to announce themselves in one way or another. I think that’s close to the level of interaction between the non-disabled and disabled today. Most of us still feel most comfortable in our own self-devised ghetto – hanging out with only close friends or family or others who share our disability. Or we go out wearing our disability on our sleeve, ready to defend our dignity at every turn.

Maybe the most revolutionary thing any of us can do at this juncture in history is to put ourselves out there in the most mundane and ordinary ways. Go grocery shopping, roll around the neighborhood, spend an afternoon at Costco, splurge on a meal at the Soup Plantation, and act like it’s the most normal thing in the world. It may take repeated outings before others see you (and you see yourself) as just another citizen or customer. Frequent interaction can be consciousness-altering for all parties involved.

Social audacity, it turns out, may just be our collective ticket out of the ghetto.

Copyright 2010, Allen Rucker

Los Angeles is a much different place before nine a.m. on a bright Sunday morning. It’s almost human. The noise is gone. The cars and trucks on the freeway are gone; you control the time it takes to get anywhere. The air is cool, the mountains rise up, and your focus changes from that idiot in the Prius in front of you to the place you actually live.

On the Sunday morning of the big ADA Photo Shoot, you entered the open gates of Dodger Stadium, a vast cut-out in the middle of LA, and you felt like you owned the place. The parking lot was like an abandoned air field. With a forty foot mural of Dodger first baseman James Loney staring down at you, you choose one of three million empty parking spaces and join the only congregation in sight: 400 or 500 people, about 200 of them in wheelchairs, loitering around Section G. It looked like either a big family reunion or maybe an outdoor tent meeting. Or the monthly gathering of people who collect Cabbage Patch dolls. It struck you as something small town and local, far from LA-style grandiosity. They now have a flea market once a month at Dodger Stadium. It probably has the same non-urban feeling.

I know that there were several potential spots for this ADA celebration, but as luck would have it, the baseball park was the perfect choice. Sure, there was a little sewer scent in some areas, but in a rural setting, that could have been the drainage ditch down by the county park in Watch Out, Iowa. I grew up in a small town and every year the Boy Scouts would go on a door-to-door paper drive and then dump all the papers in the American Legion parking lot for some truck to haul off. It was about this size and about this level of excitement.

The first thing I saw as we pulled up to this revival were the kids in wheelchairs. Every stripe of humanity was there, but my eyes kept looking at the children. This stunt photo/Guinness World Record-shattering occasion, I started to think, was really a kids’ affair and the rest of us were just there to fill in holes in the human “ADA” letter formation. The kids were having a great time, eating sweet rolls and watching Gary Karp juggling on stage, and if they were very lucky, having the winning number to win a flip camera or a vintage baseball card of Roy Campanella, a gem thrown in by the Reeve folks. The youngsters got a little restless waiting for the photos to be taken by the guy way up on the crane, but they snapped right back for the congo line of wheelchairs moving across the concrete like a snake in the woods.

If you are a six or seven year old girl in a chair watching Ali Stroker singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a cappella, and realizing she had so much grace and power in her voice, she didn’t need the amp system – that’s got to make you feel good. Or the dance troupe, bobbing around on stage like the regional finals in “Glee.” Or just the buzz of the crowd. When Sam Maddox and others started passing out the sun umbrellas – another clue to how well the event was organized – the whole day seemed like a day at the fair.

Among all the fine speechifying about the ADA and how it has changed us, I think Jesse Billauer, the “Life Rolls On” founder and not much more than a kid himself, made the most pertinent point of the day: if you have friends in wheelchairs, get them out of the house. And get yourself out of the house. Out in the world. It’s good for us and it’s good for everyone around us. The hiding out phase is way over. Presence will make as much or more of an impact than politics.

Especially for the kids.

Copyright 2010, Allen Rucker