Tuesday, October 12, 2004
The Father abhors wheelies, "wheelies" referring to people of either sex who for one reason or another reside in wheelchairs. During his college years at the University of Missouri wheelies took up the entire sidewalk, which was not wide enough to accomodate them. A non-cripple with adequately functioning legs walked around them or, during winter, leapt into several inches of snow to avoid them. This affected The Father deeply and is the reason he accepted a nondescript job bidding drywall, married young, fathered five children he only wanted theoretically, and lived twenty years a life devoid of meaning or fulfillment until he met Terri, married her, found happiness, and is presently forcing his nightmarish interpretation of The Brady Bunch-esque family onto me, making my life more complex and conflicted than I need at this stage in my development as an adult.
I hate wheelies, too, for they are the direct cause (as outlined above) for my misery.
The other day America witnessed the long-awaited demise of the highest-ranking member of the wheelie hierarchy that threatens to overrun our businesses, our entertainment venues, and our beloved prairie lands. Christopher Reeve, injured by the fall taken off his horse as he practiced the gentlemanly sport of fence leaping, irritated countless people with his self-serving advocation of cripples, as the following quote from a young man in Texas illustrates:
The man spoke at the fucking Oscars and called for more movies about handicapped people. He never did that before the accident. If he didn't care then, why should we care now?All research aimed at eradicating or alleviating diseases and permanently-debilitating injuries ought to cease. Besides the massive expense and the consumption of human effort that could be applied to more worthy causes, focusing attention on whiny, pompous paraplegics forces the rest of us to acknowledge our own impending deaths and the myriad horrible ways in which our ends might come about.
Until it happens to us, we should not concern ourselves with the pain other people live with daily, especially when those people are famous, wealthy, and successful. Anyone who manages to eke out a satisfying existence for himself whilst the rest of us toil ought to die a severe, dramatic death- that'll learn 'im. Christopher Reeve acted in one successful film and milked it for all it was worth. For the last nine years of his life, he could not move any part of his body except his mouth, which he then proceeded to use inordinately in recompense. To take a favourite saying from the same young man I quoted earlier, "What a douche"! Knowing full well he would never walk again, Reeve had the audacity to, at least publicly, chug along anyway with his "I think I can" attitude in order to inspire his own and other people's false hopes. The media exploited Reeve and allowed him forums to express his sudden plight in sympathetic terms.
But Hollywood should never address cripples or the diseased or the people affected by them, all of whom number in the millions. Hollywood serves only to portray unpleasantries such as war, political upheaval, the lives of heroin-over-dosed pop culture icons, and the evil forces of nature- things that "stick it to the man" somehow. Michael J. Fox isn't trying to overthrow the government- all he wants is to stop shaking. How unromantic. Well, tough noogies for him. In Back To The Future he should have leapt atop his Vista Cruiser and proclaimed to the world, "Stop everything! We have to devote the rest of our lives to stem cell research!" And nevermind most people knew nothing of DNA, let alone stem cells. The twenty-three year-old Michael J. Fox should have known then what he does now.
People spend too much time trying to cure breast cancer, too. That aggravates me on a more personal level, because my mother died of smoking-related lung cancer. But no one cares; people can only spend so much time "fighting the war against _________". "Victims" of lung cancer don't deserve the label because they did it to themselves, whereas women (and a couple of unfortunate men) simply wake up with deadly lumps in their boobs.
The Father and I sat watching the television one evening when an advertisement appeared for the Houston-sponsored Komen Foundation Race For The Cure. The Father uttered a sound of indignation and muttered his outrage that breast cancer patients received all the press attention. At the time I viewed the world differently than I do now; I rebuked him with, "If Mom had died of breast cancer, you would cry that no one remembers people with breast cancer!" But now I know better- lung cancer patients are more important and suffer more pain than anyone else. Everyone reading this should leap from their chairs and devote the rest of their lives to curing lung cancer.
But wait- what do I care? I'm not dying- it was just my mother. It was only Christopher Reeve. Sit back down, kids.
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 3:12 PM]