Essay On Disabled People

In America today, there are over 54 million disabled citizens (LIFE Center for Independent Living). They are the nation’s largest minority, transcending barriers of class, race, sexual orientation, and gender. Some of them are born this way while others acquire their disabilities later in life. They are the victims of accidents, diseases, and genetic conditions. They are your neighbors, your family members, and - should you live long enough - they are also you. At best, the human body is only ever temporarily able. We have no way of knowing what tomorrow will bring for us and physical bodies. We will all age and we all will injure, so in the end it’s all just a matter of what we can and can’t recover from. This has been an inevitable fact of life since the very inception of mankind. Throughout our country’s history, though, we have been seen to repeatedly ignore this inevitable truth. We have treated the disabled as if they were entirely separate from us, and not a projection of what we may be. The disabled were frequently denied a place in our democracy, and still are to some extent, as if their disabilities prevented them from …show more content…
They are often looked down upon with pity, seen as unfit for survival in day to day life. This was especially true for an early America. In colonial days, when the focus of the soon to be American people was primarily on survival and the construction of a new community, things such physical stamina and mental acuteness were considered essential (LIFE Center for Independent Living). Dependency of any kind was considered a burden on both survival finances. So, as early as 1751 in our nation’s history, the states began opening institutions as almshouses, workhouses, and insane asylums for the sole purpose of “the support and maintenance of idiots, lunatics, and other persons of unsound minds.” (LIFE Center for Independent