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• Posted by Elizabeth McClung
• 20 Aug 07, 6:41 AM

What surprised me this week was not just the awareness of a disability apartheid, but the short space of time it had taken me to completely accept that I too did not deserve equal access. I was jolted awake with last week’s ). Ota, after buying a ticket on Singapore Airlines was refused airplane entry at Kanasi international airport because of his “disabilities to his limbs and in speaking ability.” Ota had obviously bought the ticket, gone to the airport, and gone through some of the check-in when, two hours before the flight, his visible disability was noted and he was denied entry to the flight. The judge said that the captain and flight crew must “have a common view” on what to do in an emergency. Or rather, seeing someone with CP, the flight crew didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how much help Ota would need, was not trained in giving that help, and decided the solution to the problem was to force it back on Masayuki Ota (in denying him the right of equal access to goods and services) rather than change the organizational structure.

Having been on planes with people who speak almost a dozen different languages (none of which matched the safety announcements), I find the excuse of “safety in times of emergency” to be laughable. The fact is, you can be too drunk to stand up while on an airplane (as I was once when I got bumped to first class and went crazy on free champagne) much less find an escape hatch and still have no problem from the staff. But if your limbs twitch and you slur your words on boarding however...... As for “special attention” there is always at least one person who pushes the “crew attention” button within three minutes of boarding (and every 4 minutes thereafter), but again, they don’t have speech difficulties and a visable disability.

Admittedly, this event occurred in Japan, a country where the government poll earlier this year found that about the airline, “they are not running an air ambulance service. The next thing you know quadriplegics will expect the same consideration”. While Ota’s lawyer said, “disabled people cannot move freely if it is necessary for them to notify in advance each time what disorders they have”.

These two statements struck home because I have so often encountered the first attitude, and only now realized how much I had accepted the second. I am so used to being left behind by wheelchair accessible buses whose drivers don’t want to ask able bodied people to move for me that I don’t even bother complaining (not after the training manager informed me he told his drivers they could leave wheelchairs behind in “some” circumstances). Indeed, when I go to a restaurant and am told that the two tables in the entire establishment I could have used are full and I will have to wait and hour or more (though the restaurant is half empty), I now consider it my fault for not notifying them in advance.

I moved from the UK before they had passed a law ensuring that people could not deny goods or services based on sexual orientation. And you should have heard my screaming every time someone told Linda or I, “No, can’t do it, not for you” because we were lesbians. If last year, someone had told me, “Sorry, tall females can’t eat/shop/get haircuts/get beauty treatments/exercise here” I would have run to the papers with a strange glint of righteous fury in my eye. These days, because I can’t run anywhere, getting told that about twice a day is normal. Wednesday, when I went to the mall I was told by one store clerk, “This isn’t a store for wheelchairs to come in” and I was like, “Okay.” (Remember, I live in Canada; no disability laws here). If I don’t give advance notice AND a doctor’s note, I don’t get to use the gym or board a plane. I was talking to my physiotherapist about getting a doctor’s note for the BC ferry system to use their first aid bed while on board and she told me not to do it because “then they (BC Ferries) might decide to ban you from using their ferries.” That’s not something you want to hear when you live on an island. I’ve been banned from gyms, I’ve been turned down by agencies which transport people to medical appointments after being told I would have to hire the car and an RN at my expense. I agreed. They then decided, “It wasn’t worth the risk.”

So why do the same gyms which turn me away have subsidized exercise programs for people recovering from a heart attack; the same gyms who allow type A personality “heart attacks waiting to happen” people to come and do what they please without a blink of an eye? And these are the gyms which require me to have authorization from a doctor, AND the head of the gym AND the athletic director? But more important, why do I think that is normal? Talk as much as you want about a social model of disability or a society not able or willing to see and treat disabled as equal; but at what point did people under apartheid accept that it was “just the way things were.” Why is it my responsibility to tell everyone everywhere I wish to go in order to ask permission from them first? And when, in just six short months, did this become something I don’t even think about anymore?

The overwhelming majority of comments on the airline article support the airline in not allowing the man with CP on board, including comments from airline crew staff. One crew member asks; how am I, a woman, supposed to help him wipe himself in the bathroom? Another wants to know how Ota could think about foisting the responsibility on others when it was HIS role to find someone to accompany him. It was? Under what law does being disabled mean the person with the disability is required to find themselves “a keeper?” Particularly when it is so clear that those commenting (and likely those on the flight) had no idea of what different disabilities there are, much less that disability needs are individual. “The next thing you know quadriplegics will expect the same consideration”: Ignoring that the comment seems to put quadriplegics on the same level as certain animals; as the videos on

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