Transcending Disability
A few days ago, John Guardiano wrote an excellent tribute to Charles Krauthammer to mark his 25th anniversary as a columnist at The Washington Post. I have a somewhat different perspective on Krauthammer. I first encountered Krauthammer through his essays in The New Republic. Those were the pre-Internet days, and one couldn’t easily read out of town newspapers. I was attracted to Krauthammer only in part because of our interest in similar subjects. A Krauthammer essay or article always stands out. Somewhere within the piece there’s always a pithy and linguistically elegant comment that makes you wonder why you haven’t looked at an issue in the way that he has. Also, Krauthammer is a true Renaissance Man. He has studied every subject that he writes about intensively. No other columnist brings to his work as much knowledge of history, economics, as well as other social and natural sciences. This enables him to place events in the news in their proper context. Readers of Krauthammer’s columns always learn something that they did not know beforehand. As an aspiring journalist, I have consciously tried to emulate him, since for me journalism is essentially a form of education.
Sometime after I had become a Krauthammer admirer, I found out that Krauthammer and I had both had a significant physical disability. Our respective disabilities are very different from each other. Krauthammer broke his back in a swimming accident after his first year of studies at the Harvard medical school. He has quadriplegia and uses a wheelchair. I’ve had cerebral palsy since birth, and this impairs my gait, speech, and the use of my hands. Still, I identified closely with Krauthammer. Here was someone with a serious physical disability that had made it in a very competitive profession in the “real world”. People with disabilities, who were born in the 1950s and 1960s, just didn’t have many such role models.
Through arrangements made by some common friends, I got the opportunity to spend some time with Krauthammer on a visit to Washington. We connected immediately. He was the first person whom I’d ever met who understood my need to transcend my disability, or to have an identity that was separate from my disability. I not only wanted to emulate his writing; I wanted to emulate his approach to life.
My admiration for Krauthammer increased even more when sometime later I interviewed him for a radio program on disability carried by the University of Toronto’s radio station. The interview made such a lasting impression on me that I still remember almost every detail of it, more than twenty years after it was recorded.
Krauthammer’s story is inspiring. After he was injured, he was admitted to the same hospital at which he was studying to become a doctor. He took advantage of this to continue his studies while he was still a patient. His professors came to his room so that he could keep up with lectures. He took his whole second year while he was flat on his back. He returned to his regular class in his third year and graduated with the same students with whom he entered medical school, in spite of his injury.
For Krauthammer, the key to living with disability was what he calls “denial”. That means living life with a disability, as if you didn’t have one. Krauthammer told me that he didn’t let his disability affect what he wanted to do with life. His interview with me was the first in which he talked extensively about his disability in public. As far as I know he hasn’t done another. Krauthammer doesn’t like profiles that portray him as being heroic. This portrayal is fundamentally distorted. Successful persons with disabilities are not heroes. Like all of us, they are merely trying to do the best with the cards that life has dealt them.
But more importantly, raising people with disabilities on a pedestal is patronizing. It is evidence of the failure to take persons with disabilities seriously. The most recent issue of the University of Toronto’s magazine contains an article profiling a blind sociology professor, Rod Michalko, who has been hired to develop four “disability studies” courses. In the article, he claims that he is opposed to “our culture’s deep desire to get rid of disability, to either cure it or even rehab it”. Michalko also says, “Being blind or being in a wheelchair gives a certain perspective on the world that’s valuable. I say that my blindness is not a condition; it’s part of who I am.” This is identity politics taken to absurdity. Would anybody really choose not to walk or see if they had the opportunity to do so? A non-disabled person would be ridiculed for making this argument, but somebody with a disability gets a professorship at a distinguished university.
As a person with a severe disability, Krauthammer’s greatest triumph may be his success in escaping such patronizing. For those engaging him on debate on the set of Fox News or commenting on something that he has written, Krauthammer’s wheelchair is irrelevant. Of course, Krauthammer deserves much of the credit for this triumph. It is ultimately the excellence of his work that has enabled him to transcend his disability. But, I suspect, even Krauthammer would admit that he has been lucky. Ending up in the hospital in which he was studying was extremely fortunate for him, as he acknowledged in the radio interview. I used to think that acquiring a disability in mid-life was more difficult than having one from birth. After all, people who were born with their disability have no memory of living without disability. They, therefore, never have to deal with the sense of loss that must accompany the permanent loss of function in some of their body. Yet, perhaps people injured in mid-life carry over with them a drive to succeed and be independent, that, through low expectations, society has robbed from many who have had their disability from a young age.
The profile of Michalko claims that he is trying to “eradicate prejudices associated with being disabled”. Doubtlessly such prejudices still exist. But they are more likely to be eliminated if people follow Krauthammer’s example. There is nothing wrong with saying that there is nothing good or virtuous about having a disability and that it is better to live life without disability. Yet having disability need not be a barrier to accomplishment. The stigma associated with disability won’t disappear until society becomes accustomed to seeing many people like Krauthammer, pursuing excellence, in all fields of human endeavor.