Jan Grue has Muscular Dystrophy. He is a professor at the University of Oslo in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography.
Grue was born in 1981, the International Year of Disabled Persons. He has a deep understanding of living in a time when the official world began to say, “yes, people with disabilities have rights.”
He reflects on the pleasure of taking his son to daycare, sharing the tasks of running a household, of being married. He enjoys teaching at a university and the collective achievement of being able to travel through a community on public transit. As he says in his book by the same title, “I live a life like yours.”
Grue discusses aspects of everyday challenges that are often overlooked by others. For example the latch on the gate at the daycare is set high in the fence so parents can open it, but children can’t. The latch is high enough that Grue has trouble reaching it while maneuvering his wheelchair into a position to keep the gate open so that he and his son can scoot through. If the timing is off, the gate closes and the whole business starts again.
If there are other parents at the gate at the same time, they often step in to help, or offer to help. Some stand by and wait while Grue manages on his own.
Evidence suggests that as a species, we’re much more likely to help or offer help than to stand by. Pre-verbal children will make efforts to help an adult who is having a difficult time completing a task1. And Grue’s son helps with the gate, now that he is big enough to reach the latch while standing on his Dad’s chair.
Why are people standing around and not even offering to help? Do people grow out of their willingness to be helpful? This a possible explanation, but here is another. Grue’s wife met up with another parent at the gate one day, one of those who stands by and waits. It turns out that the parent was about to step in when the message “see the person, not the disability” flashed across her mind. Following that line of thinking, she held back.
From this example and others, Grue demonstrates that the way we’ve implemented disability rights has unintended consequences: the results are uneven2. You can read more of this fascinating first hand account in The Guardian: The High Cost Of Living In A Disabling World
Footnotes
- For more on this interesting topic, you can listen to the Happiness Lab’s podcast The Kindness Of Strangers
- This is born out in the prevalence of disability among people who are homeless. In a recent survey in Canada, 79% of women with experience of homelessness have a disability. Try: New Survey Shines Light On Homelessness And Housing Need In Canada
