I've been on a journey this past week, a voyage of the mind and heart, through waters I've never really charted before, researching material for a column I planned to write on society's attitudes toward those we call the disabled.

The initial plan was to discuss the most obvious and common aspect of this attitude -- people's tendency (and, I confess, my own) to avert one's eyes when passing a disabled person on the street. As if by not looking, "not seeing" the disabled person, we do not have to acknowledge that someone is different than us.

What I found while doing research and talking with several people who have been classified as disabled is a can of worms, or rather hundreds of cans, filled with thousands of worms.

Society's attitude toward the disabled is not just evidenced by someone averting their eyes on the street -- but seeps into every aspect and level of their lives.

This attitude is not a recent development. It's been with mankind since the earliest of civilizations. But why has it persisted into the 20th century and why does it now seem poised to march into the 21st century?

One would think that in the information age, this millennia-old attitude would have died a well-deserving death.

But, when one remembers that it was less than 60 years ago when Hitler's storm troopers rounded up the mentally incompetent, the disabled, the blind, the crippled, and turned them into the first victims of the holocaust -- one realizes that mankind has still a long way to go in accepting all types of people into society.

Thousands of years ago, babies born less than perfect were killed or left to die of exposure. Those who weren't killed, or those who were disabled in an accident, often were delegated to the lowest-class status, existing only by their tribe's or clan's forbearance.

But we're supposed to be educated folk now and supposed to know better, and so while we don't physically kill them anymore, we do it symbolically by averting our eyes and relegating them to the shadows of society.

Going on this journey o mine, I had to confront some of my own attitudes and behavior towards the disabled. Where had I learned this attitude, to avert my eyes -- where had any of us learned to be this way?

Then I remembered a history lesson from a long-ago elementary school classroom. The subject was the Spartans and how they created one of the best fighting forces in what was then the known world.

Cited as one of the reasons for their being able to do this was the fact that each child was thoroughly examined at birth. If the child was found to be less than perfect, to have any abnormality, or anything that was thought to be different, he or she was immediately carried out beyond the city's wall and left to die of exposure.

And in that long-ago history class, while horror was expressed than a less-than-perfect child had been the victim of infanticide, the true meaning of the lesson as a social rule was also subtly expressed -- perfection leads to being the best, anything else deserves death.

Not all early societies emulated the Spartans and their desire to purge their culture into perfection. Instead, other groups turned them into social pariahs, beggars of baksheesh, criers for alms. But this is the information age, and we're all beyond that, right? No one would kill a baby anymore jut because it's not perfect, or let a child grow and mature thinking or she had nothing valuable to contribute to society as a whole. Right?

Wrong!

Don't fool yourself into thinking that less-than-perfect babies aren't euthanized any more. One of the more shadowy aspects of the pro-choice, pro-life debate is the number of women who have chosen to have an abortion after an amniocentesis has shown them to be carrying a less-than-perfect child.

Hundreds of sociological studies have shown that accomplishment of a project, no matter how small the task, gives one a concept of positive self-worth.

But there are thousands either born with disabilities or later disabled, who simply sit idle, withering, blocked from making a contribution, because society sill wants to turn them into criers for baksheesh.

The disabled who can work are usually unemployed or underemployed; many who can be trained to care for themselves have been institutionalized into a vegetative state; many more suffer from a lack of health care, mainly because most insurance companies have written them off as uninsurable.

Is life so cheap in this day and age that we can afford to waste even one mind, one life -- just because it is not what is considered the norm?

An age-old dilemma for mankind; what to do with those who cannot take care of themselves -- those people who (it is thought) cannot contribute fully to society? the options seem to be either dispose of any potentially-born disabled through abortion or turn them and those disabled by accident into social dependents.

This simply cannot be! It cannot continue any longer. We as a society have to finally philosophically move beyond the ancient Spartans and realize that everyone has a role to play in our society -- no mater how small that role may appear!

We can no longer afford to actively stifle the disabled by wholesale warehousing of them into institutions or denying them a chance for gainful and character-building employment. We can no longer symbolically kill them by averting our eyes when we pass them on the streets.

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If you would like to drop the author a note about the article please email to deborah@ipa.net

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