By Julia Jang
On February 10th, a calm weekend with a nice cool breeze, I couldn’t beat the constant boredom, so I started to look for something that would attract my attention on the internet.
What I coincidentally found through the algorithm of YouTube was a video of a man whose lower part of his body was paralyzed due to a fall accident, sitting in a wheelchair and doing social experiments in Austria. One point that I was impressed with was when the man tried to take a public transportation bus. Once the bus driver noticed the man sitting in a wheelchair, he came out from the bus to put the ramps down for the man to get on the bus. Plus, even though it took a few minutes for the man to ride the bus, the passengers didn’t show any irritation or be mad at the man for taking too long. Moreover, some passengers would voluntarily help the man lift the wheelchair so that the man doesn’t have to struggle to get off the bus.
Angel Lee (12) said, “People should be more open-minded about those who are differently abled, and we should implement more services for those people. Also, we should try our best to help them as much as possible and treat them as if they’re one of us because they are.”
Throughout the video, I obviously thought that Austria had a particular education system or any input to Austrians about disability or the ways to treat people with disabilities at school. However, most Austrian schools do not deal with the topic of disability in school, and it’s just that they are used to seeing people often helping someone with disabilities in their daily lives. These kinds of repeated situations allow Austrians to accept people with disabilities as typical, which already has been culturally imprinted on their perspectives. For Austrians, the fact that someone has a disability wasn’t a reason for them to change the way they treat people. Instead, just like how children are not educated to eat, someone with a disability is just part of their society; it was something they learned naturally. At that point, I realized I had been forgetting one thing that is highly critical to our lives: we learn how to understand people through caring and helping people around us.
As I watched a 20-minute-ish video paid off, it has provided meaningful insights to me for a trivial change. I think we are still in the process of treating people with disabilities as members of a community, trying to think away from seeing them differently. In short, I want not to position our perspectives stereotypically but to see them as individuals.
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