āHANDICAPPEDā
Ā Ā
Soon after the Eleventh Hour passed,
Before the trench-scarred earth could feel the plow,
Parades were held to mark our victory,
And monuments erected for the dead.
But beneath each waving, patriotic, flag,
The new-born centuryās hope had turned to fear.
And for the over hundred thousand men
Who had returned from fighting Over There,
And kept their lives, but lost their limbs or sight,
There were no words of praise nor time for grief.
Ā Ā
Our nationās future called for confidence,
With new assembly lines to build, and run ā
The wheels of Progress must forever roll.
We could not risk our young Democracy
By dwelling on injustices, or loss.
And wounded bodies, now, were question marks:
How could you be a man, and be in pain,
Or one iota less than strong and free?
And in those places where the blood spilled out
Could foreign and seditious thought seep in?
Ā Ā
The orders came from generals to the ranks:
Remember that youāre in the Army, still.
Your duty to the country is to fight,
And ānormalcyā the ground you must retake.
Recovery must be both swift and sure,
And you must show your cheerful gratitude.
You must not think that you have paid enough.
Now, this is voluntary. You are free
To take the jobs we will retrain you for,
Or lose your benefits, and all your pay.
Ā Ā
Photographers would come to capture them,
With smiling Red Cross nurses by their beds,
Their bodies framed as emblems to inspire.
One word appeared with growing frequency
Meant just for them, in captions underneath.
Before theyād left for war, theyād seen it used
For those defective children who canāt learn
And by the colored men who spoke of hate:
A word that meant āa burden, and a shameā ā
A burden they must strive to never be.
Ā Ā
In days gone by, it had a different weight:
A sporting word to even up the odds,
Where fathers bantered, laughed, and put down bets
(The air thick-scented with horses and the turf).
But now, those golden memories felt like lies,
For none of them gave their consent to this.
The exhortations to recall their pride,
And rhetoric that spoke of useful work,
Were not enough to quell their growing rage:
The sense that, now, their race through life was fixed.
Me. A poem excerpted from my book The Monstersā Rhapsody: Disability, Identity, & Culture (Lulu.com 2016)
There is a claim within the Disability community that āHandicappedā is offensive because, in 1504, in order to deal with all the disabled veterans in his country, after the English Civil War, King Henry VII declared that if you were disabled, it was now legal to beg for your living. So the wordĀ āhandicappedā comes from the phraseĀ ācap-in-hand.ā
Snopes.com, along with many other abled bloggers, have gleefully debunked this folk etymology, pointing out that an earlier meaning was actually applied to extra strong horses in a race, and therefore, disabled people should stop being so cranky about it, and realize that people are actually giving them a compliment (continuing the habit of invalidating the experiences of the disabled).
But the actual shift in the meaning of the word āhandicapā from āextra challenge given to the stronger competitorā to āA derogatory term for a disabled person,ā did, in fact, happen primarily around the disabled veterans returning from war, and a nationās distress over what to do with them all.Ā
It wasnāt the early 16th Century, and it wasnāt by a kingās royal decree. It was the early 20th Century, and it came about through the tangled interactions of intense nationalist propaganda, toxic masculinity, professional charity, and military bureaucracyā¦ with the rise of the eugenics movement thrown into the mix.
But projecting all that humiliation youāre going through in the present, all that anger and disillusionment, into the pastā into the last days of the knight in shining armorā is one way to hold on to a sense a of dignity and worth when the rest of the world would like to pretend you donāt exist.
TL;DR: This Remembrance Day, remember more than those who died in battle. Remember, too, the ones who lived, and came back changed.
(via aegipan-omnicorn)
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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