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