Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist by Michael J. Fox

Author:Michael J. Fox
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Canada, Autobiography, Motivational & Inspirational, Actors - Canada, Personal Growth - General, Fox, Michael J, Actors - United States, Entertainment & Performing Arts - General, Entertainment & Performing Arts, General, United States, Individual Actors And Actresses, Personal Memoirs, Actors, SELF-HELP, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Growth, Biography, Biography And Autobiography
ISBN: 9781401303389
Publisher: Hyperion Books
Published: 2009-03-30T05:00:00+00:00

My physical condition drew attention to the human cost of a failure to pursue breakthroughs in scientific research, just as Tammy Duckworth's injuries pointed to the price some were paying for our decision to go to war. However articulate we are in expressing our positions, it is the unspoken part of our message, over which we have no control, that is irrefutable and therefore extremely frustrating to our critics. Don't want people to be reminded of the terrible toll of war? Don't let the media show images of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq, and characterize any critical examination of the war as unpatriotic.

It had taken me a long time to get past the idea that my symptoms and physical challenges were offensive to me, but I had never truly given much thought to the prospect that they might be offensive to anyone else. So how to process that?

In a recently published New York Times article, "Clearly, Frankly, Unabashedly Disabled," Mireya Navaro asserts that "the public image of people with disabilities," which "often hinged on the heroic or the tragic," is changing. Interviewed for the piece, actor and double amputee Robert David Hall, who plays a coroner on the CBS series CSI, observed, "It used to be that if you were disabled and on television, they'd play soft piano music behind you." I particularly like this observation because it gives a real insight into the packaging that people feel is necessary when presenting images of stories about the people we refer to as disabled. At once the same and the opposite of the shrieking violins in the shower scene of Psycho, it roots our reaction to what we are seeing away from thinking and directly toward emotion. The right score under the image of an attack dog could convince us we're looking at a puppy. It's dehumanizing and marginalizing and it's easy to see why, as Ms. Navaro in the Times points out, people like Robert David Hall speak out. If society is encouraged to view you in a certain way, you come with theme music not of your choosing and perhaps not suited to your point of view. It's something you have to overcome with each encounter and experience. Why is this segment of the population responsible not only for how they feel, but how you feel about how they feel?

The Times article quotes Kaylee Haddad, an amputee who'd been approached by a mother at a neighborhood pool who told her to put her prosthetic leg back on because it was "upsetting my child." The only explanation, if not excuse, for the thoughtlessness of this mother is fear. Unwilling or unable to explain disabilities to her daughter, she reacts to Ms. Haddad as though she were the transgressor. Yet it seems ridiculous to imagine a mother approaching an able-bodied woman at a pool and asking her to drape a towel over one of her legs because it's upsetting her amputee daughter.

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