"
What is a sexy body? ... I mean, people, Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than I do and nobody is calling her disabled!" With that statement Aimee Mullins provoked laughter and applause from the audience at the
TED conference, a woman born without both the fibula, those other bones in the legs. Because of this lack doctors have her legs amputated for her first birthday's gift. Since that surgery she devoted all the time to exercise walking on a variety of prostheses and she eventually became the actress, athlete and a photo model.
I've met Kresimir Butkovic through Facebook. Before I learned he is a quadriplegic, I've read his poetry, read some of his columns on the portals, and I liked his style. And then Kreso
swam Barbat channel, Adriatic Sea, said the news (use
Google Translate, please). So what then? What these idle journalists are babbling about? Only then I, a fool, realized that he was disabled man who swam only using his hands and beat the sea where he was injured many years ago.
Aimee tells about how she was supposed to speak in front of 300 youngsters, and before she entered the hall she heard their teachers whispering to the kids: "
Do not stare at her legs, she may be embarrassed." She asked the adults to leave her for a few minutes alone with the children and then encouraged the youngsters to
look at her legs. She inspired their imagination to help her make an prosthetics like an animal legs to make her a super-woman, and to allow her to jump over the house. After enumerating the various animals that jump and run, one child said "
Why wouldn't you want to fly?" All were delighted at the hall. It requires a completely different view, just one moment in our mind and we do not have any pity for disabled people, but we are starting to see their potential.
Kreso lives in a country that has standards and moronic policies that trample even on ill people (
see the article about the law that denied a remedy for severe disease of my friend Fred, use
Google Translate, please), and Aimee lives in a country that made her special carbon fiber prosthetics modeled on the legs of cheetah. Neither of the two people do not see themselves as disabled, and I do not see them in a such way, either. Kreso swims in 'dangerous' waters that ruined his many opportunities, and Aimee is running on the legs that were supposed to lie helplessly in the bed for ever, and won prizes in athletics.
Society is changing, let us evokes the words of
Aimee's encouraging speech. No longer do we talk about how to overcome deficiencies and how should we just maintain care for disabled people. We are increasingly talking about how to improve the man, to augment people. We are now thinking about the potential every human being has in himself/herself. That's the reason Japanese engineers are working on getting
better types of exoskeleton in order to give disabled people the ability to make moves ten times harder than they might do. Prosthetics no longer fills the lack of something – it is a symbol, just as well as Kreso's swimming, that man is the
architect of his own identity. The worst thing we can do is not look at the disabled, to avoid staring at them. On the contrary - look at her feet and do not regret the Kreso's inability and appreciate the potential that we all have.
Let's finish quoting Shakespeare: "
If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?" Yes, Pamela Anderson has even more prosthetics in herself than Aimee Mullins, both are bleeding, both are laughing. The only difference is in
how we look at their legs.
