Sunday, February 3, 2013

Nancy Mairs- "Disability"



Mair’s essay, "Disability", argues how the media make people with disabilities almost as if they are little helpless children who need to be taken care of every day. Mairs believes that the media, by failing to depict disability as ordinary, both marginalize viewers with disabilities and impair the outlook and coping skills of the ‘temporarily abled’. In her essay, she writes how a TV movie showed a woman recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, but she chose dependence over independence. She is upset how such shows oversimplify people with disabilities by making disability central to their lives.  While I do agree with Mairs, I don't think people can help it; it’s just something that happens. Little kids can be the most brutal simply because they do not know. They don't know that pointing out a difference is not accepted in society. I think that people try so hard not to treat someone with a disability different, that they treat them differently. Curiosity is part of human nature, we all want to know 'why' something happens, or 'why' someone is the way they are. It's nearly impossible to treat someone who is different, the same way that a person treats everybody else. Unfortunately, that's just how it is.

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