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Inspiration Porn: How the Media and Society Objectify Disabled People

Photo via Time.  [image: Florida State football player Travis Rudolph, a Black man with short natural hair, eating pizza in a school cafeteria at a table with a  white boy with very short red hair and glasses, who is seen from behind.] Kit Mead kpagination.wordpress.com A while back, an example of inspiration porn crossed my Twitter feed: a Florida State University college football player sat down and had lunch with an autistic boy in a cafeteria. The story got picked up by the New York Times. I don’t fault the college football player very much, if it all (but I hope he asked the autistic student if the company would be welcome). The football player probably just saw a person likely excluded by classmates. He wanted to make sure the student was not alone. At worst, there is the element of pity involved, but the act itself was not ill-intended. I…

Random Acts of Pickles

Patty Porch www.pancakesgoneawry.blogspot.com Last night, as I lay awake staring at the ceiling, I realized that it has been exactly a year since Danny was diagnosed with high functioning autism. I am surprised at how quickly the time has passed, since hearing the diagnosis made me feel like the world was ending. I remember how it felt like being punched in the stomach when the doctor said that no, Danny did not have PDD-NOS, but rather autism. Autism. The word I had been dreading. My sister came with me for that diagnosis and she held my hand and vainly tried to hold back her tears. She wasn’t surprised by the verdict — I don’t think anyone really was — but that didn’t make it any easier for either of us to swallow. I felt strangely defensive and protective of Danny. All I wanted to do was put my arms around…

Little Songbird

Kris Robin Today we went by the dress store to pick up my daughter Emily’s pageant dress. I had chosen a dress shop close to where we lived, though to call it a shop would have been a bit of a stretch. It was a storage building attached to the side of a trailer. Off to the side stood the Woodrow Wedding Chapel – yet another storage building where happy couples could walk down the aisle after renting a wedding dress. An orange tabby was asleep on a bale of hay by the front door. A little girl’s white dress was draped over the bushes in the sunshine. It really didn’t look like the place to rent a pageant dress, but I had been lucky enough to find one for Emily there last week. With shoes, however, I had no luck anywhere. I had to wonder at my rotten luck…