Keep on Truckin’

I was walking along West Cliff Drive the other night. It was a warm California evening, with a beautiful gibbous moon hanging in the clear sky. Standing on the cliffs above the ocean, I felt a wonderful serenity – the sound of the waves, the scent of the sea, the light of the moon reflecting gently off the waves.

As I headed down the street, my bliss was interrupted when a voice from behind me said, “Never stop walking.” A very odd remark, I thought, and half turned with a quizzical look to see who had addressed me. This tall, somewhat muscular looking man was about ten feet behind me, with a smile on his face. I didn’t respond, not knowing exactly what to say, but continued on, starting across the street back to my house.

“You’re doing good,” the man said, continuing to smile at me, a somewhat misty look in his eyes. After a second, I made some inane remark like, “So are you.” Of course, what I actually wanted to say was more like, “Who the hell are you, and why do think I need your approval?” But I didn’t, because I just didn’t want to go there, and I knew that he thought he was being supportive or encouraging or some rot like that. And I’ve learned from a lifetime of experience that people that make such remarks just don’t get how inappropriate their behavior is.

You see, I walk with a limp, and use a cane to help support me. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I am as unconscious of how I walk as anyone else. Only if I’m climbing some steep stairs, or faced with some unusual obstacle do I note that my passage takes more energy than most people's. Even then I’m just noting a fact, a reality check. The feeling is about the same one I had when riding a Grey Hound in Tennessee, and noticed after an hour that I was the only white person on the bus. Hmm, that’s interesting – I’m different in this particular way than everyone else around me.

Or, I notice it when, for no apparent reason, someone decides to point it out to me. Generally the intention is good, like the guy on West Cliff. But the effect is to say, “Hey, you’re different. And not only that, you need me, a total stranger, to encourage you to do what you obviously are already doing.” What the guy on West Cliff was really doing was treating me like a child, like someone inferior that needed support to get by. Really, the look on his face, the voice tone was just like you would use with a kid riding her bicycle for the first time, “Hey, you’re doing good! Never stop peddling!”

What he did, what behavior like that does, is put up an invisible wall, a barrier that separates me from him. I can’t imagine he would just randomly say to people on the street, “Never stop walking,” unless, of course, he was stuck in a feedback loop from 1969, channeling Mr. Natural’s spirit, but somehow getting the translation wrong. “No, you dunderhead, it’s ‘Keep on Truckin’’,” Mr. Natural yells into his brain from Beyond the Void. It would be like me seeing a black man on the street, raising my right fist, and saying “Right On!” Or like raising my right hand palm forward and saying, “How,” to an American Indian. Either of those behaviors would seem absurdly patronizing.

People achieve equality in a society when no distinction is made between them and everyone else based upon any superficial qualities – they are seen as an individual, not as a member of some group. This is an obvious statement, yet apparently some still need to be reminded of it. Just as the women’s liberation movement rejected the notion that men should hold the door for women, because it implied inferiority, so people with disabilities don’t want to be condescended to. That doesn’t mean don’t be polite: I hold a door open for anyone if they are just about to go through it! If I see someone in a wheelchair approaching a door, I might hold it open for them, or ask, “Can I get that for you?” But I ask it in same manner and voice tone I would use with a UPS man approaching a door with a load of boxes, not the tone I would use with a five-year-old.

I don’t mean this little tirade to sound bitter (another stereotype!). I’m not bitter about my disability, I’m not even bitter about people’s reaction to my disability. I’m just annoyed, and tired of total strangers addressing me like a child, or as if I’d just had some terrible mishap. I’m fine; we’re fine, us gimps. Well, as fine as everyone else, meaning we have our good days and bad days, some of us our jovial and some of us are jerks, and most of us can be either one depending on the day and the phase of the moon. But either way, we’ll just keep on truckin’.

Alan Scott is a native and continuing resident of California. The serpentine course of his life has wound from honor student to hippie dropout to office worker to science student to political activist, and most recently taken the form of unemployed non-profit administrator. He has been a closeted writer all the while, and Ascent Aspirations is the first to publish his work.

Email: Alan Scott

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