Logan Wright, an autistic teen from Belleville, Ontario, got a private tour of Riverview Zoo in Peterborough, Ontario with his family on June 25th. It was the Zoo’s way of making up for unpleasantness that the family had encountered at the facility two weeks previous.

Image Description: “Ableism” written in white block letters on a brick wall.

Content Note: Ableism, hate speech, institutions

Logan Wright, 13, his eleven-year-sister Brinlee, and their mother, Ashley, visited the Riverview Zoo on June 10th. Logan, who communicates using sounds and a few words, was agitated, but not upset when they arrived at the zoo, according to a Facebook post that Ashley wrote later:

“He was being loud. He was flapping his hands. He was jumping. But he was happy.”

She was not prepared for another zoo visitor, a man walking in front of her with his family, to turn, glare, and yell, “Why do people bring kids like this out in public?”

Logan  became more visibly distressed as they headed for the washrooms, likely because he needed to use the facilities, Ashley said.

 The same man who’d yelled at hear earlier approached her, this time yelling:

“Why do people bring kids like this out in public? They ruin society!”

A bystander intervened, telling the man to leave the family alone. After confirming that Ashley was okay, he left the scene.

Ashley chose not to respond to the confrontation at the time, but to focus on getting Logan into the washroom. They then went to the camel exhibit  – the camels are Logan Wright’s favourite animal at Riverview Zoo.

Stories like this really piss me off, because:

1. They are such rank, gross ableism
2. They represent the worst of non-disabled peoples’ tendency to think that they have the right to police the worlds of disabled people
3. The offenders in them are intolerably rude and sometimes hateful

Let’s unpack this. The man who yelled isn’t named in any media accounts that I’ve found. For convenience, let’s call him Ableist Asshole.

Rank, Gross, Ableism

You can’t get much more ableist than suggesting that Disabled children (there’s a chance that Ableist Asshole didn’t know that Logan Wright was autistic specifically) shouldn’t be out in public because they ruin society.

I’m not sure what more needs to be said about this.  Unless this guy is prepared to confront publicly the mother of every teen who’s ever become loud and agitated in public and demand that these mothers put these teens under house arrest, then I call ugly ableism.

And if he’s willing to do that, I call “asshole.” Sorry, not sorry.

Policing Disabled People

I’ve talked about this before, when I’ve written about people who accuse people who look non-disabled but legitimately use disabled parking passes of being fakers or frauds. There are a lot of non-disabled people out there who feel entitled to make a sweeping declaration of judgement about a disabled person and their life based on a snapshot like seeing them at the zoo or other public place momentarily. They’re so confident in whatever authority they feel they’ve got over disabled people and their loved ones that the idea of confronting a mother and demanding that she keep her disabled child inside seems reasonable.

And when I hear stories like this, I ask myself about how the disabled person involved would have to change in order to be “acceptable”, and most often it comes down to this:

Quiet.

Or somewhere else.

Society put disabled people “somewhere else” for a long time, to ensure that our inconvenient needs didn’t bother society, and now Canada has the blemish of brutally abusive institutions on its history.  In Ontario (where Belleville and Peterborough are) it’s been so widely agreed that people don’t belong in institutions that they’re all closed, and it’s really just sickening to hear, in 2018, the cavalier throwback to institution-era thinking that Ableist Asshole demonstrated.

Hearing it must have been a knife in Ashley Wright’s heart. I don’t know how much Logan Wright understood of the encounter, but Ableist Asshole’s profoundly ableist (how many times can I say that word in blog post, I wonder?) assumption that the teen didn’t understand, and that it was therefore “okay” to say these things in front of him, needs a blog post by itself to unpack.

Rude and Hateful

A lot’s been written recently about the decline of civility in general, and as I hear more and more about this sort of thing happening, it strikes me that we’re forgetting how to treat each other as human beings.

When did people start to think it’s okay to get in someone’s face and yell hateful things about their child, in front of that child?

How did Ableist Asshole figure that yelling in front a teen that was already agitated was going to make things better?

He could have done any  number of things if Logan’s agitation and his mother’s attempts to calm him were making him uncomfortable:

• He could have asked if there was something he could do. Maybe he could run for a bottle of water or a snack, or to call someone, or maybe Logan’s sister could have joined his family for a bit until Logan had calmed.
• If he didn’t feel comfortable offering assistance, he could have turned his head and encouraged his family to focus on something else.
• He and his family could have left the area and returned later.

Logan Wright: The Bottom Line

Ableist Asshole didn’t care about making things better.  He was angry that Ashley Wright had “ruined” his day at the zoo by letting her disabled kid leave the house, he wanted her to know it right then and he felt entitled to tell her so, no matter what was going on in her world.

He was selfish and cruel. The headline here could be, “Ableist Asshole is Ableist.”

Thankfully, however, the Riverview Zoo gets it. Jim Moloney, the manager of the Riverview Zoo was appalled when he learned of what Logan Wright and his family experienced:

“…our community and the zoo is very welcoming and supportive of everybody.”

Logan Wright and his family very much enjoyed their private tour of the zoo, which included a chance to feed the camels.

Read Ashley Wright’s entire Facebook Post

The post Disabled Kids “Ruin Society”, Mother Told While Visiting Zoo with her Autistic Son appeared first on Girl With The Cane.