Disability Attitudes for All Latitudes.

Attitudes drive our behavior. As individuals and as groups, what we believe and how we feel about a matter largely determine what we do with respect to it. Our behavior further reinforces our beliefs and feelings. Today we'll consider how this circular relationship works with respect to people we include and those we exclude from our marriage beds and neighborhoods, our work and our play.

The groups to which we belong span the entire human species, several races, many nationalities, innumerable local communities, tribes, clans, and families. We subdivide ourselves by characteristics over which we have no control--sex and age--and by some that reflect personal choice or effort--such as socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, business/industrial or occupational groups, professional, scientific, or literary/artistic groups, and so forth.

Let's note at the outset that however we choose to cohere to some people and partition ourselves from others, attitudinally and physically, we may be doing violence to the ultimate Unity of Life pointed to by most of the world's religions. The idea that somehow we are all fragments of One Being, whether we're billionaires or homeless street people, is almost ubiquitous.

The most powerful attitudes of which I'm aware are the worldviews or paradigms that define entire cultures. To see how these are mirrored in disability attitudes, let's review the stages by which humans have come to imagine a global society in which inclusion, not exclusion, reigns supreme. Our history has been divided into several major stages of technical-economic development with correlated worldviews. Briefly:

* At our foraging--or hunting and gathering--stage, the group worldview was "archaic." [That means we don't know details because there were no written records and we've found few artifacts about which to speculate.] Individuals were presumably BIOcentric--focused on staying alive and getting their genes into the gene pool. Even though this epoch saw the familialization of males, the taming of testosterone, eco-masculinists are fond of this period.

* At our horticultural stage--farming with digging sticks or hoes, which pregnant women could do without miscarrying--the cultural worldview was "magical" and people were generally EGOcentric. That is, most had developed beyond mere biological survival needs and were aware of having some ability to influence the environment, and of having psychological needs and wishes. Women produced about 80% of the food and got quite a little respect. About 80% of the god-figurine artifacts found from this era are female. Virtually every Great Mother society was horticultural. Eco-feminists like this period.

* At the agrarian stage, the worldview was "mythic" and people tended to be ETHNOcentric. When their senses told them their magic wasn't sufficiently reliable, but their intuition supplied symbolic images of something in the universe more powerful than they, the age of mythic religion began. It provided a means for including more people in the group one called ones own. Instead of limiting "we" and "us" to the family, clan, or tribe, inclusion broadened to all people in a larger region who worshiped the same mythic god, often manifested in a king. With this widening embrace of "people like us," the ability to identify with progressively larger, more diverse groups, the move toward eventual globalization began in earnest.

Since plowing causes miscarriages, it's likely that both sexes agreed that the men would go out to produce the food while the women stayed home to do the child rearing. Since men produced most of the food, they got most of the respect. Virtually all the gods became male--and we have written records as well as artifacts in evidence.

* The industrial stage is characterized by a "rational-empirical" worldview and further enlargement of the group with which individuals could identify--nations and federations with vast territories and populations one might never see or meet. Attitudes of patriotic nationalism developed as the basis of identification shifted from religion--a shared god to worship--to commerce--a shared market in which to compete. This awareness reflects a rudimentary WORLDcentric viewpoint.

As machine power relieved male muscle of production work, gender polarization began to falter. The reason for it was disappearing. It's no coincidence that the first feminist treatise was published in 1792, the dawning of the industrial age. Women began to get included in the public workplace when the practical reason for their previous exclusion passed into history. The techno-economic base of society changed in a way that obliterated the reasons for females' former relegation to household duties.

Attitude change often lags behind techno-economic development, and it seems to me, a woman, that it is taking a long time for many men to understand that the reasons for a sexual division of labor have largely evaporated. However, for many men--who've long enjoyed the perks that come to "providers"--it seems unnatural and it's happening too fast.

* The information age is associated with a more strongly entrenched WORLDcentric attitude plus a multi-perspectival worldview, more encompassing and powerful than linear reasoning, which transpersonal-psychology theorist Ken Wilber calls "visionlogic." A more evolved mental faculty than rigidly perspectival rationality, visionlogic reflects an ability to perceive multiple layers of similar but not identical patterns and to grasp complex, nonlinear networks of interconnections, and it entails integrated functioning of body, intellect, and emotion. Of interest to us here, it involves a more fluid and playful consciousness--nowhere better exemplified than by fuzzy logic, the value of which we are just beginning to recognize.

Parallel to the earlier reframing of women's capabilities and roles, we are now finding that, because of technological advancements and disability-rights legislation, disability is no longer as handicapping as it once was--vocationally, socially, or recreationally. The emancipation of women began when they were no longer so disadvantaged by having less muscle power than men have. Similarly, the independent-living and disability-rights movements began when the information age started creating jobs that need almost no muscle power and fostered the development of assistive devices.

This is the good news. The bad news is a bit of backlash. There are still more workers than jobs in many places, and non-disabled people are used to having all the possibilities to themselves. Many don't like having to share the available jobs with formerly excluded groups--so they are not joining the hymns of praise being sung today for diversity.

Globalization and the Celebration of Diversity

A key element of globalization, perhaps the key element in achieving a global society, is our predominant, collective attitude toward diversity. We hear a great deal these days about "the celebration of diversity," but some of what is happening under that banner looks more like increased separatism and re-tribalization than mutual embrace and unification. Let's be sure we understand what diversity represents and why it's considered worthy of celebrating.

Genetic diversity is crucial to the evolution of species that can survive in tough environments and develop whatever capabilities they have in ways that allow them to thrive. This is a direct result of God's brave genius in inventing sexual reproduction, with all its pitfalls, in order to vastly increase the outcome possibilities instead of sticking with the safe, old, "splitting" method, which doesn't introduce anything new until a chance mutation comes along.

It was observations of the value of biodiversity that led to today's preoccupation with cultural diversity. But biodiversity is valuable largely for the purpose of merging diverse elements to produce something new that might be more viable than any previous combination. This has major implications for how cultural diversity is viewed.

In the US, a country dominated by immigrants, the concept of the melting pot is being challenged by those who prefer the idea of a mosaic or a patchwork. Observation tells me the mosaic model promotes more separatism and hostile competition for entitlement to limited resources than understanding, integration, or cooperation. Contemplation tells me that the struggle to preserve old-country ways in a new country can stifle an individual's or group's creative contribution to the latter. As a possibly clarifying parallel, we can lay out containers of ingredients until they form an interesting--maybe even lovely--pattern, and then sit and look at them until they rot. Or we can blend them together, bake them, and eat.

To globalize or not to globalize is not the question. But our individual and collective choices between the contrasting, underlying attitudes I've called "mosaic" versus "melting pot" will influence whether the global society we create genuinely prizes diversity, tolerates it, or blatantly attempts to obliterate it.

"Special schools for the handicapped" reflect a mosaic model in which red squares represent regular schools and blue squares represent special schools. Mainstreaming involves changing the architecture and teacher training so children with and without disabilities can get educated in the same schools where they simultaneously learn how to interact with each other. This reflects a melting pot model in which differently colored squares melt and merge to create a new shapes and colors.

Segregated schools for children with disabilities are dwindling in the United States as a result of disability-rights legislation that began in the 1960s. We who are women and we who are disabled are gratefully in debt to our nation's angry African Americans who awakened us at that time to the fact that our supposedly inalienable human, constitutional, and legal rights were being ignored, denied, and flouted just like theirs were. Once awake, we started talking with each other--sharing experiences, problems, and solutions. Before you knew it, we were no longer isolated individuals; we had become members of a mutual help society.

Since then, the disability rights movement has followed the civil rights movement to astonishing legislative success, culminating in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. It has not yet enjoyed much judicial success. The agency charged with enforcement has not been zealous in doing their part ... disappointing yet, in part, understandable. Many of the complaints filed under the law have come from disgruntled employees or job applicants who would not ordinarily be considered disabled--they are certainly not the substantially disabled and vocationally handicapped individuals on whose behalf the National Council on Disability initiated the legislation.

Opportunists are everywhere and everything takes time--mainly because of attitudes. Apart from disappointing usage of the law, some employers simply cannot grasp that they are actually being asked to make employee accommodations that will cost them a little money. [Very little, on average, the research shows.] Some of the lawyers and judges involved in applying sanctions to scofflaws hold similar attitudes. Most shocking is the resistance of the medical industry to accommodating people with disabilities who try to get health services in community settings. To get competent care, we often have to go to regional rehabilitation settings, which may mean traveling 200 miles instead of just driving a mile or two to where the rest of the family goes.

It is my hope that leisure and recreation professionals will do a better job than health professionals have done. I expect that you will be more accommodating to our needs, more welcoming to us, and more willing do what has to be done to include us as full participants in your facilities and programs.

Disability Attitudes

First we looked at attitudes about globalization and diversity to frame the picture. Now let's examine attitudes specifically about disability. The primary question is this: WHY have people in general excluded and denigrated people with disabilities throughout recorded history and probably before? I'll share some of the answers that have come to me--sometimes in others' writings and sometimes through my own intuition--as I've contemplated this question.

It's only in the most recent stages of techno-economic development that homo sapiens has backed off a little from its impulsion to remove damaged individuals from the population. "Removal" could mean infanticide or lethal abandonment, or a kinder, gentler relocation to the outskirts of the city, equipped with begging bowls. Note well that this change may represent as great an evolutionary leap as the difference between then and now.

At the biocentric stage of evolution, Neanderthals needed to be strong and agile in order to survive, and they needed to acquire strong, agile mates to help them. Attempted kindness to disabled individuals could mean the sacrifice of your own life or that of a larger number of individuals in the long run. This archaic attitude--functionally correct for its time--can still be seen, carried over into post-modern America in the form of "youth worship." But in the information age it is by no means functionally correct anymore and, therefore, it is by no means morally correct anymore, either.

We humans evolve along many different lines of development, and the different lines don't all proceed at the same rate. Nothing illustrates this better than the difference between our intellectual and emotional maturity. Our intellects have allowed us to escape Earth's gravity and land humans on the moon ... while, at the same time, many of our emotional responses linger at the Neanderthal level. Why?

A partial answer can be found at our next stage--the egocentric level of development, in which personal security and self-esteem are important factors. Included people who feel lacking in these regards tend to exclude anyone else who looks different, fails to display a sense of security and self-esteem, or whose inclusion might weaken the dependability of the support group. Seeing vulnerability in others triggers one's own security and survival fears since everyone knows that "there but for the Grace of God go I." Realizing this, people with disabilities have tried everything we can think of to show others that being exclusionary simply reveals them as insecure and self-doubting. It doesn't help. Why?

Look now at the next level of our development, the ethnocentric stage. The very institutions we invented to guard and promulgate what we believe is the best in us--our religions--have excluded and derogated people with disabilities for thousands of years. In the West, disability is used as a symbol for sin and portrayed as a punishment for it in this life. In the East, disability is often assumed to reflect punishment for wickedness in a previous incarnation. People who are spiritually advanced can explain how these beliefs of the masses are wrong, but saints and sages comprise such a tiny portion of the people surrounding us that their enlightened attitudes make a barely noticeable difference.

By contrast, in the esoteric philosophies, East and West, we find non-destructive interpretations of the reasons or purposes behind disability. These may be as mundane as acknowledgement that on the physical plane, accidents do happen; or as spiritual as the idea that a developing soul may choose to experience life in a disabled body or personality, in order to deepen its capacity to feel compassion for those who are suffering.

Where are we now, as we perch on the cusp of the industrial - informational stage of development with its not yet fully reliable worldcentric worldview? Wilber defines the early phase of a developmental stage as a time when about half of us are still operating at the level of the passing stage and about a quarter are still stuck at the stage before that. Only the leading-edge quarter has begun operating pretty consistently on the incoming level. This idea implies an aspect of diversity that can be frightening to think about.

We share the planet and sometimes our local neighborhoods with people who may look like us, but attitudinally--in terms of the worldview that governs how they perceive and interpret everything that goes on around them--they are virtually members of a different life wave. In a global society, people this diverse must learn to respect each other or fake it with superior acting skill. This holds true whether the cultural norms with which others identify are ahead of ours or behind them. And we must cooperate in every aspect of everyday life.

With respect to disability, I'd better not get addicted to having everyone use politically correct language in talking about it because there will always be people who simply won't be able to understand why language matters. At the same time, there will be others whose attitudinal impeccability is so far ahead of mine that I may be unable to appreciate it.

The more highly developed we are, the more responsibility we bear for moving the whole cultural evolutionary process along. This entails responsibility for including people who were previously excluded in virtually everything we do. The diverse mental elements brought to the global planning table by people who live, mentally if not physically, in different cultural stages can increase the mental resources, tools, ideas, knowledge, skills, intuitions available to all.

Living with a disability or other socially-derogated conditions provides a crash course in understanding the suffering and needs of other people--for those who are ready to respond to it in this way.

People from the disability community rank high among the important new players at the global planning table. No longer isolated individuals, we form genuine subcultures within many nations which, in turn, are coalescing into an international community. This is true because, regardless of vast socio-cultural contrasts, we recognize that we share far more commonalities than differences--of experience, need, feeling, and so forth.

A big part of this is awareness that we belong to a club no one joins deliberately. Part of our bond is the knowledge that we've been through similar rituals of initiation--sometimes involving fairly brutal hazing--as a cost of membership. And we have simple, humble goals--to be accepted as humans and included in ordinary human activities. That doesn't leave as much room for disagreements about objectives as many coalitions face.

Disabled People Know Some Potent Secrets

Since almost no one in their right mind would want to be disabled, I have to acknowledge this fact: it's hard to value, respect, love, like, or want to be near, work with, or marry someone who epitomizes what you deeply, desperately, DON'T want for yourself. But once disability leaves the realm of the resisted unknown and becomes a part of your reality, your immediate experience--meaning it either happens to you or to one of your loved ones--attitudes change fast.

Wherever I go, I bring a case study with me, just in case I need one for teaching purposes. So I'll tell you how my attitudes changed in 1951, when I reluctantly joined the club. At 16, I had the same poor attitudes as everyone else. I would not have dated a crippled guy, but I was so swept by pity for crippled beggars that I chronically put all my allowance in their upturned cups or hats. Mother warned me that while she admired the impulse, she would not be replacing the funds. I did it anyway.. almost like a subconscious part of me knew something my conscious mind didn't.

Years earlier, my grandfather had had a stroke and often asked me to rub his paralyzed hand. I didn't want to. It was smooth where hands are usually wrinkled, which I found yukky. A decade later, when I, too, was paralyzed, I looked at my hand one day and panicked. It was smooth at the knuckles where it should be wrinkled. Mother! I wailed. No one's ever going to love me because my hand looks yukky! Mother, who had a fairly noticeable spinal curvature which had not kept her from snagging a smart, handsome husband, reassured me I needn't worry. ..when other girls had developed what American advertising in the 1950s called "dishpan hands," mine would still be youthful, smooth, and lovely.

This evolved into a game of thinking of all the advantages that could accrue from being paralyzed. People let you sit in front of them at parades because you're easy to see over and your wheelchair gives them a little protection from the milling crowd. You'll never get corns or calluses on your feet. You can go retrieve something you left in another room without having to get up. The ideas got sillier as the game wore on, but silly is better than tragic or depressed.

I was lucky to have a mother with good attitudes about disability. It wasn't new to her. Her father's stroke came years after he'd shot off his lower leg with a hunting gun. Her brother had polio at age 12 and used crutches ever after. And her own deformity, while not very disabling, forced her to reckon with the issues of looking different and feeling unattractive. She vowed I wouldn't go through that.

In addition to being experienced with disability and therefore somewhat inured to it so she didn't panic, she was smart, educated, devoted to mothering, creative, and playful. For the multitudes of disabled people who don't have playful mothers to help them take in stride what others consider a tragedy, you who have dedicated yourselves to leisure and recreation professions will have many opportunities to serve as parent surrogates once you've gathered us into your programs.

After 40 years of working in the field of rehabilitation, I was taken by surprise a couple of years ago by a young man from New Zealand. Severely disabled by cerebral palsy, he visited our home during an international leadership training program for youth with disabilities. My husband took him and his traveling companion to Disneyland. They came home starry-eyed and determined to tell me everything. As the excited recounting wound to a close, this 25-year old man--who is no recluse, he does a weekly radio show on disability--gasped "Now I know what people mean by happiness! I never understood what that meant before!"

You can help make sure that people with disabilities who are welcomed into your programs don't have to wait until they're 25 years old to find out what "happiness" means. And some of the disabled people you meet can help you and your loved ones react less catastrophically if or when disability enters your personal lives--as it very well may with age. That's because we know through direct experience what most enlightened people only believe as an idea.

It's quite possible to lack or lose some basic faculties or capabilities-the ability to see, hear, move your body at will, feed, bathe, dress, and go to the toilet by yourself--AND STILL HAVE A LIFE FILLED WITH HAPPINESS. Fun, pleasure, success, accomplishment, all the good things we all think we want are still available. Hundreds of thousands of blind, deaf, paralyzed, and otherwise disabled people have learned different variations of a basic lesson. What you think you must have in order to find life bearable is wrong. You can get along fine without most of the stuff you think you need.

Our neighbor since 1965 had a stroke year before last and now uses a wheelchair. To her close friends' chagrin, I was the main person she wanted to see at a party they threw for her. She knew that I know how to have a good life in spite of a disability more severe than her own. I even know how to knit one handed. I was the only wheelchair user she knew ... a fact that suddenly became relevant because she knew--from watching my life unfold across the street from her over a period of 30 years--that severe, permanent disability does NOT bring an end to happiness, as most novices to disability imagine. The chances of having a neighbor to teach you this are slim, but leisure and recreation professionals can engineer dozens of such pairings among participants in your programs.

True Work. True Study, True Rest, and True Play

Just as there are many jobs that can be done today by people who are paralyzed, blind, deaf, or mentally ill or limited, the techno-economic stage we're in has produced many play activities, recreations, that can be mastered and enjoyed by them also. From home based video games to the foreign fields of the Para- and Special Olympics there are suitable recreational outlets for most temperaments. Between the extremes, there are adapted or accommodated performing arts programs, nature walks, museums, camping facilities, craft programs, artist supports, and almost every other category of human leisure activity known. Not every item in every category is feasible, but almost every category of interest is represented.

In the United States--the only society I feel confident in describing--work is paramount. We feel we are somebody or nobody mainly according to the work we do. We are introduced to strangers by our names, immediately followed by our occupations, as if that reflects our real identity. Most people have areas of special interest, some field of knowledge that particularly intrigues them. Because of our societal focus on work, our favored areas of study are usually connected to our jobs or careers. We also have favorite leisure activities, hobbies and the like, but for most of us, these are secondary to our work and study. Rest and play are what most of us do to refresh ourselves so we can do our work and study better after a break.

And the four types of activities do comprise such a cycle, but certain sacred-psychology or perennial-wisdom teachings place equivalent stress on all four realms of activity--none are considered subordinate to others. Any of them could equally well prove to be the key activity that prompts an individual onward, toward the ultimate, high goals of human life--greater wisdom and justice, more reliable compassion and beneficence.

The full cycle of human activity involves seven phases of the four types of activity. True Rest is meditative, inspirational; it establishes one's dedication. True Play is expressive, and helps you establish your commitments. True Work is action that establishes one's fealty to purpose and other people. True Study, at the midpoint of the cycle, is assimilative and establishes one's involvements. It prepares you to direct your energies in the ways you intend to, not haphazardly, into outcome surprises. The last three phases include a return to Rest, which allows you to recharge your batteries, gather energy. Another Play phase helps you ground those energies so their current flows safely and constructively. The final Work phase is the action you take to realize your intentions.

This "ancient wisdom" view places both the rest and play aspects of leisure and recreation in a more central, pivotal, important role than any "mainstream" philosophy with which I am familiar. Right now, at this point in our global cultural evolution, the predominant result of disability is being cut off from the labor market--the main realm in which modern humanity conducts the work or action phases of its activity cycles. Since work is what gives rise to economic sufficiency, it only makes sense that we would fight, fight, fight against exclusion from it. However, until we win, we don't have to despair and make ourselves even more disabled by dysfunctional attitudes. We can turn our attention to the other three activity domains, which many workers attend to rather poorly. According to the sages, perfecting our True Rest, Play, and Study will inexorably lead us to our True Work--whether or not it involves paid work in the form of jobs or a career.

For that, we can really use your help.

Carolyn L. Vash, Ph.D., 35 East Las Flores Drive, Altadena, CA 91001-4835. Email: [e-mail]