Threatened or Amazed?
We build this concept as a young child that everyone is different, but everyone is special in their own way. We are taught to treat everyone equally, but accept everyone’s differences as their own. To gather the knowledge and understand that no two people are the same, just as no leaf can compare to another leaf even if from the same tree. Even if they’re the same color, the same shape, the lines could be different, the thickness, and even the size.
“On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense” by Frederich Nietzche he explains a leaf concept that no leaf is the same. Nietzche says “No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept “leaf” is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions” (par. 8). Meaning that people come up with this image when thinking about leaves and form that they are all the same, when in reality they are not. For example, when thinking about a leaf, most, people tend to think about the most typical, green, perfect leaf that you learn as a child, but tend to forget about the rest of them. Just as society has done this with leaves they have also done this with people who are disabled. They place them in the same grouping with one another even though they are completely different. Not only that, but they disregard what they are capable of doing, or they praise them for what they have done because they were able to do it with their condition. Although, they tend to forget what comes with being disabled and disregard their disability all together. Basically dehumanizing them and making disabled feel less then what they are.
For example, Kylie Jenner issued on Interview Magazine where she is in a wheelchair posing. According to the television show The View Raven Symone reads that Interview Magazine statement that states “they wanted to get people thinking about creative expression, including the set with the wheelchair”. Except what does a wheelchair have anything to do with creative expression? Isn’t a wheelchair intended to be for those who cannot walk? What does being glamorous and posing for a magazine have anything to do with not being able to walk? Nothing. Raven then goes on by speaking for people who are disabled and says “that they are offended because I think they feel, but I could be wrong, that she is using it as a fashion statement instead of the drama and the pain that they have to go through everyday” which is exactly true.
What Interview Magazine disregarded was that being in a wheelchair has nothing to do with creative expression, but rather it’s just putting those that are in wheel chairs down. That instead of seeing those people as regular human beings Interview Magazine decided to use a wheel chair as a prop and saying they wanted to do this for creative expression, but forgetting that people use these everyday just to get around. They forgot that people actually use wheelchairs because they can not use their legs like most people. That people use wheelchairs because they are. Paralyzed and they need them in order to get around, to have a normal life, and to be normal but rather seeing this they see something they feel threatened by or amazed of what people can do in a wheelchair and see someone of not as their own. They no longer just see a leaf they see something of the unknown when in reality we are all really the unknown but all of something that is of the same. Yeah we are all different types of leaves and maybe different colors, different sizes, different textures with different qualities, but in the end they are still leaves. Just as no matter how different people may seem at the end of the day we are all still humans.
