For the Few

I had the great fortune of seeing Shelley Moore speak (in person!) in October 2021. If you don’t know, Shelley is an extraordinary educator in the field of inclusion. She is known for her stellar ability to convey ideas via analogies. Analogies that make her points more salient and entertaining and unfailingly have her audience nodding enthusiastically while laughing. I’m not sure she regularly has anyone *almost* crying, but that is what happened to me in October.

Shelley’s story started off innocuous enough. It was about her repeated frustration at American gas stations when she is asked to provide a zip code in order to pay with her credit card at the pump. As a Canadian who has always lived in Canada, she has never had a zip code to provide in these circumstances and so has had to take the extra step of going inside to pay for her gas every time. The lack of a zip code was a barrier to Shelley paying at the pump when visiting the US. Until she went to Vermont. Vermont, accustomed to many Canadian visitors at their gas stations, had implemented a support for Canadians to overcome the zip code barrier:

This support was a simple sticker, with instructions in both English and French on how to create a zip code out of one’s Canadian postal code. When telling this story, Shelley expressed her amazement and delight that Vermont had come up with a simple and effective strategy that would support all of their Canadian customers who encountered this barrier on a daily basis. Sure, there were many more folks who would never need such a support, and that was just fine. The stickers do no harm to them, those people can simply ignore them and carry on with their day. But for those who do need this particular support, the presence of the stickers is invaluable for moving past an (admittedly minor, but still) inconvenience in their day. And the analogy is thus: the supports we can offer a student with a disability in a place where they are struggling can make all the difference to them, while taking nothing away from those who don’t need it. Brilliant, right? But there’s more…

Part of Shelley’s story included an interaction she had with a cashier at a gas station in a different American state that was decidedly not taking lessons from Vermont on offering supports to their Canadian customers. When the zip code issue was explained to this particular cashier, and he was asked why there weren’t Vermont-type supports in place for the Canadian customers struggling, his response was simply: “We only get a few Canadians a week here, so why would we?”.

It was right there that I was struck with a lump in my throat, my eyeballs filling with tears. It was surprising and a bit embarrassing that I was having such an emotional reaction to what was a simple plot development illustrating Shelley’s point. Why had this part of the anecdote struck me in such a way that I was instantly welling up?

My body had responded with emotion before I could think the words “that is so hurtful”. The nameless gas station attendant, with his throwaway question, implied that providing support for someone who is part of a minority is not worth the effort. Even if that support does absolutely no harm to, and may in fact help (whether immediately or in the future) those that it wasn’t designed for.

When your child is one of the few, and as the disability community shares regularly, when YOU are one of the few, the feeling of hurt and disappointment that a perspective such as this causes hits you deeply. As a professional working with disabled folks, I have always known intellectually that the people I work with are entitled to the supports they need to live and thrive. But I am sad to say that it took having a child with a disability for me to really FEEL the importance of advocating for accessibility and accommodation, to the point where I took action. And this worries me.

How do we get to the place where the majority can feel the depths of unfairness in policies that don’t include the needs of everyone? How do we transition the general public away from the mindset of ‘If it’s only a few affected, and it’s not me or my loved ones affected, then it doesn’t matter’?. How do we get from ‘We’re not making accessible housing here because there aren’t enough folks in the market that need accessible housing.’ to ‘Those who need accessible housing have a right to the same amount of choice as others have.’? From ‘It is only those with co-morbidities who will be hospitalized and die. So why put stricter protections in place for only those few?’ to ‘What do we need to do to ensure the most vulnerable are protected?’? From ‘Why would we change what we do for a few people?’ to ‘Let’s make this simple change that could benefit more people than we know.’?

Twelve years ago, before I had a child with a disability, I would not have cried over Shelley’s gas station analogy. Now that I have a daughter who is a member of the ‘few’ club (actually about 22% of the Canadian population, so more than a few), it hits differently. For me, it took having a loved one directly impacted by an inequity for me to start advocating actively. Now that I have gained some experience with it, I am getting a hint of how it feels when it seems that ONLY those who are directly impacted are advocating. I can see (and have experienced) that there are clear limits to our energy for inciting change, if not limits to our empathy, and everyone makes their choices about where to apply that energy…most often to their own benefit.

Will we ever evolve as humans to where a majority of us are thinking first of the few, thinking first of providing that which minority groups need to live and thrive, especially in these pandemic times, these times of active climate change, when vulnerability is amplified? Though it seems possible, I’m not holding my breath. For now I’d like to express my gratitude for places like Vermont, where they just seem to get it, and people like Shelley, who keeps telling the stories about what we need to do to include the few, for the benefit of all. And I especially want to extend my gratitude to disabled activists, whose worthiness is questioned again and again, and yet they keep fighting. May we all not just learn from their example, but also join them in the fight.