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28 May 2006

A column published in the "Sunday Star-Times"

DISABILITY WEEK

This has been Disability Week. Not the official version that everyone ignores, but the real one. Disabled people doing things.

From climbing Mt Everest to dangerous driving. From raising babies to raising the ire of icons. Never, surely, have disabled folk been so much at the forefront of the national consciousness.

Not since that nice Nerida Fairhall sat in her wheelchair and upset all the other archers at the 1982 Commonwealth Games. Foul, they screamed – sitting down gives her a stability advantage over the able-bodied standing. And archery is all about stability, not agility. Tough, we replied. She’s a Kiwi.

And it’s being a Kiwi that has got Mark Inglis into trouble this week. He may be disabled, he might have been part of a commercial party, but British mountaineer David Sharp apparently died because of Inglis. That has been the implication of much of the criticism.

Kiwis don’t leave people to die. Even on Everest. Dead hero Graham Hall went back for one of his party in 1996, knowing that his own survival chances would be slim. Although, outside the mountaineering community, Hall was a forgotten hero.

Forgotten until this week when his fatal nobility was held in contrast to the selfish venality of others.

Because in this case, Inglis and thirty nine other mountaineers didn’t go back. Indeed they passed Sharp on their way to their collective goal. There is medical dispute over whether the unprepared and underequipped Sharp was a gonner or not, but that is irrelevant. The act of passing the Brit by, smacked of callousness.

So opined the stellar Sir Edmund. It was not the mountaineering way, it was not the Kiwi way, it was not the human way. The air may desert you at 8,000 metres but your morality does not. The disability of the body had morphed into a disability of the soul.

The weirdest part of this whole ruckus though is that both Inglis and Hilary are right. Inglis, in that he was no position to countermand the directive of his troop leader. Hilary, in that those mountain-climbing passers-by resembled nothing so much as the bystanders in the parable of the Good Samaritan.

And yet let’s be honest shall we? Mark Inglis is a little bit mad. So’s Ed.

You have to be, if risking your life is considered a desirable end. For no good reason. It should never be forgotten that Hilary’s logic in 1953 was that he had climbed Mt Everest simply “because it was there.”

Yeah, but so is Anthrax. But you don’t see people queuing up to quaff litres of the stuff, do you? So is an erupting Mt Etna, but you won’t witness expeditions hurtling themselves down its fiery throat. “Because it’s there …” has to be one of the most stupidest justifications of the entire twentieth century.

I mean, if mountaineers admitted that scaling summits made them feel better about themselves, or that it gave them a great pick-up line the next time they were a singles bar … I could understand their motivation. If knocking off K2 was a sex substitute (and it probably would be after the frost bit) or a straight out boasting exercise … we could empathise.

But no. It’s all about testing yourself. Crap. Do a sudoka. Spend a week as a nappy changer at an old folk’s home. Try barracking for the Hurricanes in a Crusaders crowd. That’s testing yourself.

I admit to not understanding mountaineers. I expect they were the Venturer Scouts of our adolescence, the mad-keen trampers of our student days. When we were getting stuck into the grog and the sheilas, they were out there in the Taraweras scooping their scroggin. Just not normal.

Neither is it normal to burtle along at 120 kph whilst driving with your feet. But that had to be my disability achievement of the week. Colin Raymond Smith, born without arms, was pulled over for allegedly speeding, but the ticketing officer was more intrigued that Smith was using one foot to steer and another to operate the brake and accelerator. Intrigued – hell, I’m fascinated. There’s ambidexterity taken to a supernatural level.

Sadly Smith did not have a license and was grounded on the spot. But there’s a dude who didn’t need to climb Everest to overcome the odds.

Although the most touching disability case of these past seven days has to be that of Rotorua’s Jenny Sosich. The woman is a hero.

She’s 30, severely disabled, but fighting to keep custody of her nine month old son. The guy who got her pregnant shot through the moment he found out – knocking up an effective tetraplegic not being regarded as one of the great scores of his life.

So Jenny is left alone to fend with the upbringing of her child. She can’t do it alone because she can use neither arms nor legs and because there is no prospect of Mark Inglis-type prosthetics. Sadly, the district health board is not playing ball – there’s not enough dosh for her fulltime care, let alone that of her kid.

And yet compare this mum with half the dextrous deadbeats on the DPB. Here is a mum who loves her child and for whom this child will be her life. Instead she’s striking health authorities with the same efficiency as an Everest mountaineer, but also the same heart.

Little wonder then that this has been the week of the disabled. I suppose they’re different to the rest of us. Just better.

ENDS