Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] npgcablecom> wrote:
> > Interesting.  I'm somewhat apprehensive about Avatar myself; my wife's
> > got friends who are disabled, and they're quite unhappy about one of the
> > central the ideas behind the film being that if you're disabled, you
> > couldn't possibly live a normal life and the pinnacle of hope is that you
> > could do something that made you not be disabled.
> > Jim
> Ugh.. Haven't even seen the film, but they *think* that because it
> offers someone that wants his problem fixed a solution, its
> anti-disability? Have I got that right? Why is it that some people, if
> a) they are born with one, or b) suffer one, but don't want it fixed,
> treat people offering solutions as though they are out to burn down
> their church, and the people that actually take up the offer as though
> they had betrayed the holy religion of disability, and need to be
> excommunicated. They have such massive chips on their shoulders that
> they would rather rob someone who *was*, for example, once sighted, of a
> chance to see again, than actually find themselves confronted with
> someone suggesting, "Don't you ever wonder what it would be like *to* see?"
>
> With all respect to your wife's friends, some of these people are worse
> assholes to "normal" people, than normal people have ever been to them,
> and its a damn movie, in which the character *wanted* to have the
> choice, as a means to work on the front lines, not some frakking
> bunch of scientists picking people with missing legs out of a hospital
> wards and beaming them into blue aliens without their bloody permission
> or request. Not every attempt to solve basic malfunctions in the human
> body is a conspiracy to destroy the "specialness" of people who, for
> what ever reason, develop a damn stupid chip on their shoulder about not
> wanting to even have the option, because it makes them feel somehow
> better to be part of a group that where all mistreated by idiots years
> earlier, as a result of their differences.
>
> Yes, there are some that think they *need* fixing. But that just proves
> that non-disabled people can be assholes too, not that the ones
> protesting someone *choosing* to deny the holy writ of the disabled are
> apostates for opting to try the alternative, especially of they are,
> "*gasp*", restoring something they already had, not being asked to be
> given sight, after being born without it, or some other situation, where
> they *might* have a point about it being offensive to try to even offer it.
>
> This is almost as absurd, forgive me saying so, as the protesters
> against the film because they didn't pick **it** as some sort of soup
> box for gay love stories, but went with what *most* other films always
> have, and made the love interests male and female. Its just bloody
> ridiculous.

I would never find better wording for it...

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