State Road 50, addendum

As usual, when I try to write about a real life thing when my mind is most definitely occupied by another real life thing, I mess up what I was going to say, especially when both are fairly closely related to the main issue, disability, and when I am finding myself angered to be talking about this crap yet again when, as I keep saying, I'd rather be talking about Falling Skies. (A nasty post about that show is brewing in my head, but, later.) I mean, I certainly was going to complain about the road conditions on State Road 50 – it's habitual by this point – but what I meant to focus on, instead of just mentioning as an aside, is that the article completely failed to mention wheelchairs and pedestrians.

This is fairly typical for the road. Without exception, arrangements have always been made for drivers to get through, but not wheelchair users, even though I live in an area with several wheelchair users. (At least five live on the four blocks of this street alone, to give you an idea, and a very disability friendly townhouse complex is right next to one of those intersections that has been mostly filled with holes for the past years.)

And this is fairly typical. Because unless we are right there when a decision is being made, we tend to be forgotten about. And even then.

Which brings me to the Hugo Awards. I watched bits and pieces of them on Saturday night and read the Twitter feed and laughed and enjoyed the happy Hugo moments and congratulated all of the winners, but as I watched I couldn't help feeling an uncomfortable tingle down my spine as each and every winner and presenter climbed up stairs to hand out/accept their awards.

No wheelchair access.

And based on Twitter and the various reviews/responses to the Hugos that I've seen, the only people who noticed were me and laurelhel.

I flashed back to a person representing another con, telling me, "Well, if you do decide to come and participate in a panel, we'll make sure that panel platform is ramped, or we'll have someone lift you up."

And then I flashed back to my college graduation ceremony where (for completely different reasons) I was on crutches, which meant a long, long pause while I struggled up the stairs to get my diploma (and since I graduated from a large class at Binghamton, this also meant realizing that approximately 20,000 eyes, maybe more, were on me, which made me feel faintly ill). But on the other hand, I'd gotten to and across that stage without anyone lifting me up.

Alas, out of sight, out of mind seems to be one of the chief operating principles here. I've noted that aside from the State Road 50 construction issues, much of my town is actually fairly wheelchair accessible – this because it's filled with fairly visible wheelchair users. And yet, even here, where you can always see us on what sidewalks exist, we live in a town with missing sidewalks, frequently hellish curbcuts, and a new shiny water fountain play thing opened up just this year that is surrounded by stairs, where the ramp was tucked out of sight, hard to find and difficult to see. Even here, we frequently can't cross or access the main business road.

Leading to the conclusion, alas, that visibility isn't everything.