Disabilities

In class, we walked in and listened to a song called "Spasticus Autisticus" which was played by Ian Dury & The Blockheads. We then discussed viewpoints on disabled people and what we thought. A lot of people, when asked, said that they felt sorry for people for disabilities and they believed that disabled people were brave. However, as the lesson went on, people felt more entitled to discuss their deep feelings about disabled people that may cause offence in some circumstances.
As a class, we all came to a conclusion that our opinions of disabled people depend on their disability. For example, people in our class felt more comfortable around physically disabled people rather than mentally disabled as mentally disabled people can be intimidating and we are less inclined to treat them like humans. The main patterns of opinions in the class were: there is a slight awkwardness as we do not want to patronise the,; some people embrace their disability e.g. paralympians and wounded soldiers. However some play on it, this may be because they are bitter or maybe because of envy; some people find it easier to pick on disabled people than to empathise with them.
My opinions on disabled people are: If a person comes past me in a wheelchair, i do not know where to look, as i am not used to it. However, i do not want to be rude, but sometimes i do a patronising smile.
If the person is mentally disabled, i feels as though i have to speak loudly - which is quite bad as there are a lot of mentally disabled people that are extremely capable of achieving what able-bodied people are.


We then went on to looking at famous disabled people, here are the people we could think of and their disablility:
Steven Hawking (Wheelchair, Motor Neuron)
Heather Mills (1 Leg)
Gordan Brown (1 Real Eye)
Stevie Wonder (Blind)
Verne Troyer (Dwarfism)
Muhammad Ali (Parkinson's Disease)
Michael J. Fox (Parkinson's Disease)
Gary Coleman (Dwarfism)
Albert Einstein (Autistic)
Leonaro DaVinci (Autistic)
Terry Pratchett (Alzheimer's Disease)
Ian Dury (Polio)
Ray Charles (Blind)
Mozart (Deaf)


There are also many more. We then went on to disabled people in films and discussed their roles with the films. Here are some films with disabled characters and how they were used in their films:
Forrest Gump (Hero of the film)*
My Left Foot (Hero of the film)*
I Am Sam (Overcomes disablility)*
Born On The 4th Of July (Hero of the film)*
Waterboy (Hero of the film/comical character)
The Ringer (Comical character)
Unbreakable (Villain of the film)
Million Dollar Baby (Tragic ending for the character)*
Avatar (Hero)*


* = Award winning film.


A lot of these films won awards, this may be because of the reality of these characters. Making some character disabled is quite inspiring to the audience and is quite realistic to us, which is why we like these sorts of films.