Endless Inequality

Recently my friend sent me a video about people who were gun victims and gun advocates. The purpose of the video was to show an experiment where gun victims and gun advocates came together to share their stories to each other (one-on-one), and then tell the other person's story in first person (I'll link the video below if you want to get a better sense of it. It's easier to watch than explain). It was very emotional and personal; many of the stories involved deaths of loved ones or violent situations, but the people that stood out the most were the two of the people that were both pro-gun rights and had physical disabilities. One was a woman and the other was a man. Both described feelings of vulnerability because of their physical disability and said that having a gun made them feel safer. The woman said that disabled women are three times as likely to be assaulted by someone compared to a woman without disabilities. The statistic really shocked me. It made me think about how vulnerable they must feel at times, and how we make them seem vulnerable. I think that because we don't normalize people with disabilities, we make them seem abnormal and sometimes less than an actual human when in reality they do the same things as we do. 

I felt ignorant when I actually started researching the statistic that the woman in the video brought up, because I had never heard of it. We keep their issues at a "safe distance from other human issues," and as a result become blind to the them until we come across some video on Facebook that mentions it (Mairs 14). Upon researching I found that even the most innocent members of society suffer from this. A child with a mental disability is at 4 times the risk of experiencing violence or abuse compared to a child without one according to the World Health Organization.

 Disgusting. 

How could we just ignore this? Why was this not a debate question during the election? Why are there no headlines about this? Why didn't I know about this? I think the worst part about all of this is that it makes sense; it makes sense that people who might not be as physically or mentally capable are taken advantage of, but how anybody could do it and still feel human afterwards is beyond my mental capacity. There was a situation where "three Philadelphia residents were charged with keeping four mentally disabled adults locked in a dungeon without food or water" according to the Huffington Post. The police thought they were doing it to steal their disability checks, and found that the people being kept captive had the mental capacity of 10 year olds. It sounds like it was pulled out of a crime show or a horror movie, or maybe even a nightmare.

This issue needs to be made known. It needs to be a priority. How can we let people just like us be abused and exploited? There are too many people in this very country that are in need of help. People are people. We need to help each other, and treat each other as equals. The country we live in isn't the land of the free. There's no equality yet, and quite honestly I've become disillusioned with those words that promise equality and freedom when it's obvious not everyone is.

America. 2017.

Link to the video I mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph5M0dGokA
It's long but it's definitely worth your time