It was 1971, and I was 20 years old. I was sitting in bar in a small town in Maine. With a beer in one hand a guy taps me on the shoulder and says, “Would you like to make $100 a day?” That would be equivalent to a thousand dollars today. I didn’t ask any questions, I jumped on it. I took the job and found out my duties were to eat live rats and chickens to scare people. I found out other people with disabilities were put in the same situation as part of the “freak show.” Transgender men and women would go as bearded women and “half-man, half-woman.” People with scaling diseases would be called snake men and snake women. People with downs syndrome were called dog boys. Looking back, people with disabilities were being made into animals. Back then I was too ignorant to see it, I could only see pictures of dead presidents floating in my eyes. This was not the last time I was preyed on – the military also manipulates people with disabilities.
I was put in special classes for “retarded” students all my life because I didn’t fit into the cookie cutter of society. In school I was bullied and told by my teachers that I couldn’t do what other children were doing. They told me I wasn’t qualified for anything besides menial labor – they told me if I tried I would fail. A psychologist pulled a survey out of his desk drawer as “evidence” that I wouldn’t succeed.
Poor people with disabilities are often taken advantage of. Just like the Freak Show, people from the military waived money and promises in my face. The military likes to target people with learning disabilities, especially autism and dyslexia, because they think they will be better at following orders and not questioning what they’re told to do. The government sends young people video games as a way to train them to be good soldiers. The scores are transmitted to the government. The higher the scores, they are invited to come to military bases to train. When someone is autistic, they are happy to see that someone is taking an interest in them. When they stopped the draft in 198X, they needed a new way to recruit.
The government should not have the right to monitor children or send them bribes. According to the government and the military, the lives of young people with disabilities – especially poor people and people of color – are expendable. The military needs to stop preying on the rest of the world the way they prey on people with disabilities.
Classroom curriculums should reflect all the accomplishments of people with disabilities and prevent students from going into the military. There should be more training for people with disabilities to use their alternative gifts. People with disabilities can do whatever they want – it’s the society that is disabling. We don’t need to change at all. I have written two books, I’m a staff writer for an online magazine, and I am an anchor person for a local TV show on activism. I’ve gotten two awards from the City of San Francisco and the Board of Supervisors. I decided a long time ago that the system is wrong and that most of research is generated by people who’ve never lived through it. It took 50 years to learn to use my own internal guide to heal my community.