The Third State Has Risen: Literature Foreshadowed It and Now We Are Living It

Whether this blog goes “viral” or even gets read by anyone else is not why I am writing it. Usually, I write to inform or to educate and maybe I will do both with this piece as well, but this time I am writing out of disgust anger, and fear. If anyone asks, I am not shy about giving my opinion about something, and most of my opinions on almost every issue tend to gravitate towards the middle or the left of the political spectrum, but for this issue, I am sure I will piss off some of my regular allies when I say, “what the hell America?” There is a difference between being accepting of others and sanitizing language to erase History and an entire culture’s identity. 

When I originally heard about the change of the name of the agency that runs the program that provides my support services from “the agency for persons with disabilities”, to “the agency for persons with unique abilities” I was angry just like many of my colleagues within the disability community are. That has not changed even though I am writing this blog piece/letter many weeks later. What has changed is the way I view the overall issue as the climax of an issue that has been going on in America since before I was born. 

I believe that the sudden push by those outside of the disability community to erase the word “disability” from the dictionary is the latest and greatest attempt from the third state to erase individuality from society. You might be asking yourself, why do you say that? The rest of this blog will attempt to provide an answer to your question. 

In 1931 Aldous Huxley wrote a little book you might be aware of entitled “Brave New World.” For many Americans, this was required reading material at some point in their primary education. For those who aren’t familiar with the book or weren’t raised in America, I will attempt to summarize the basic idea behind the book. Huxley’s book depicts a Godless world where feelings are suppressed by pills, and nobody is forced to deal with the realities of life. The following quotes encapsulate this idea. 

“And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always Soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always Soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past, you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears- that is what Soma is.  

“Ford we are twelve; oh, make us one’.

Even though Huxley’s book was written 92 years ago it is scary how accurately this book foreshadowed life today. America is now a society controlled by a silent “third” state which infiltrates all facets of our lives including telling us what and how to feel. The latest assault on language is just another way to continue the same campaign of attempting to erase all individuality from the world. Don’t believe me? Here’s further proof.

The assault on language started several years ago when they pressured a football team in the NFL to change their name from “The Redskins” to “The Commanders.” I’m not trying to come off as a racist, I’m just saying, why did the Redskins have to change their name while the Florida State Seminoles' name has been unchanged? In another example, two country music groups changed their names to get rid of their ties to the South. Again, I am not saying that everything that occurred in the South back before I was born was right or just, I am arguing that by changing something’s name to make it sound better or to make a group feel better, we diminish the fact that it happened. Even though our history has dark periods in it, if we do not acknowledge them, aren’t we destined to eventually repeat them? 

You may be asking what history and language have to do with one another and in particular, your argument about the “third state?” My answer is simple. The current push to change the terminology used to describe the disability community is an attempt to diminish or erase their history and culture. I do not say I have a disability; I say I was diagnosed with a disability but there are others in the community who use the term person with a disability to describe themselves. In short, I ask what gives any outsider the right to define a group of people when they do not belong to that group. The answer is simply this. The third state does not want us to define ourselves, rather, they want to tell us who we are or who we should aspire to be. 

In closing, this blog may at first seem less concise than my previous pieces but upon further examination, I believe you will find that not only do I make a good argument about disability and language but that like Mr. Huxley and myself, you should fear what the future holds for us all. 

Terminology Debate

"Language... .has as much to do with the philosophical and political conditioning of society as geography or climate...people do not realize the extent to which their attitudes have been conditioned since early childhood by the power of words to enable or condemn, augment or detract, glorify or demean. Negative Language inflicts the subconscious of most people from the time they first learn to speak. Prejudice is not merely imparted or superimposed. It is metabolized in the bloodstream of society. What is needed is not so much a change in Language as an awareness of the power of words to condition attitudes." (Saturday Review 1967) When one thinks about the above quote, it doesn't sink in, so we take a closer examination of our surroundings. From early infancy, ours is conditioned by our physical surroundings and the Language we take in. For example, a child in India will learn several dialects of the Indian subcontinent. U.S. English will be utterly foreign to them. However, someone in America will quickly pick up on the U.S. idiom of chilling if they have grown up in American culture. It is a great wonder how powerful a language can be. It can be neutral, it can be positive, but it has its most significant impact when negative or assuming.  This blog came about as a result of a conversation with a friend of mine named Laura Carson. She recently asked me what the acceptable term is for someone with a disability? It got me thinking, what exactly does the term "disability" even mean? Words only have context if we give them context. I use the word "gimp" to refer to myself quite often. For me, it has no negative context because I am using it humorously. However, other individuals who are in my situation distinctly hate the word. Why is this? The answer is simple. I was not conditioned to have any negative connotation of the word "gimp." The first time I encountered the story was positive. Indeed, in a movie entitled King Gimp about an art student named Dan, who was extraordinarily disabled but used his disability to increase his quality of life greatly. I recommend that everyone, whether disabled or not, at some point in their lives to check out this excellent documentary. It will give you a different perspective on disability and life in general.  However, back to my point. Because I positively encountered the word, there's no negative connotation behind it. A language is a unique tool that humans possess. We can establish our meaning and context for a variety of words. Something insulting in one Language may be a term of endearment in another. Not to get too controversial, but even the meaning of the n-word is all based on context. Nowadays, there is no argument that the n-word has a negative connotation, but that is due to its sorted past and the way it was used. The word's original meaning meant "ignorant," but it no longer has that definition because people have given it such a negative context and definition. The same can be said for terms relating to disability. One of the most common terms to describe disability is true "disability." Isn't this a negative term, though? Disability implies that someone cannot do something, which is partly true for anyone who cannot walk or cannot speak normally. However, it is also not true because just because there is one way to do something doesn't mean there aren't other ways around it.

I have never been one to be politically correct at all. Like I said above, I make fun of myself all the time, but I do understand the need in an appropriate professional setting to be non-condescending. Therefore, I make this argument. The term "disability" should no longer be used. One might ask...what do I suggest? What should be used to replace it? In my education classes, a term that is often used is exceptionality. I think this is a neutral term—neither positive nor negative, which allows the person with the exceptionality to determine the word's context. The person sitting next to me, helping me write this, is exceptional in some regions of her life just as I am exceptional in certain areas in mine. Neutral Language, while not changing one's condition, maybe better than society immediately labeling a person. Because as much as I would like to hope that society's labels don't impact people, I would not be honest if I said this was the case. On the deepest level, the Language that we hear every day affects us. To make this point even clearer, let me cite another example that my friend mentioned in the same conversation. 

My friend described the concept of how their race labels everybody. When we are young, we do not know the difference between a Filipino American and a Japanese American. It is only through social interactions that we learn the difference, and Language is a formal creator of difference in the world. In closing, I argue that you can call me "crippled,” "disabled,” "exceptional," or whatever you like depending on the emphasis behind the word. I don't care about the actual word, but what the meaning behind the word is. 

I know many of you haven't been commenting, and I appreciate your readership, but I would also like to see where you stand on this one. How do you think Language affects society and the creation of difference? Am I on to something or totally off base? Let me know what you think in the comments below. 


Footnotes: 
1.) http://www.disabilitymuseum.org/dhm/lib/detail.html?id=813&page=all
2.) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0239528/