Unceasing Echoes

I’ve noticed how common it is that, when talking critically about poor behaviour towards disabled people  and other groups that face discrimination - from rudeness, patronising attitudes to overt discrimination - the criticism is often brushed off with the explanation that the person hadn’t meant anything by it. “they didn’t mean anything by it”.   It’s a funny thing to assert, how does anyone know that someone else who has, to all intents and purposes behaved badly to me or someone else, didn’t mean anything by their words or behaviour. Were they perhaps merely an innocent conduit of unthinking channelling of society’s negativity towards disabled people? Is it that the negative attitudes are so ingrained, that people should not be blamed for innocently adopting them? I find it particularly strange that this excuse is used to cover such a wide range of utterances or behaviours – they can’t all mean nothing, can they? ...

My post ‘No half measures’, while exposing an attitude that I’ve had thrown at me many times over my life, showed something of an extreme example of the common belief that people are either blind or they’re not - they can either see ‘normally’ or they can’t see anything.   I have had strangers express that indignant anger at me on a single brief encounter, their realisation that I can see something when they have assumed that I could see nothing at all has thrown them, disappointed or shaken their trust in the purity of ‘the blind’. People often resort to insulting behaviours in such circumstances and I’ve written here before about being sworn at when it has been realised that I’m not  as blind as I might have been, and my last post described a recent incident where a shopkeeper come amateur ophthalmologist waved his hand in my face asking how many fingers he was holding up.   In a world still full of so ma...