For about 15 years I lived next door to Jack Leonard, one of the greatest men I've ever known. His essential greatness had nothing to do with the fact that he was a quadriplegic. His disabling injury -- sustained during a water skiing accident when he was 21 years old -- came to magnify his greatness, and over the years he became the object of extensive news media coverage, all of it positive.
Near the end of his life he was coaching baseball at Eckerd College, teaching future major leaguers how to hit a curve ball from the vantage point of a nifty motorized cart. My children and wife loved him, my dog Lance loved him, and I loved him, even after he got me to try chewing tobacco. He laughed when I turned green.
All this is a prologue to Jack Leonard's opinions about disability and the news media. He had no complaints about the glowing profiles of him that appeared in the newspaper year after year. But he recognized a basic and vicious pattern: that you rarely see a person in a wheelchair in the news who is not framed either as a hero or a victim.
Jack once told me that he knew a lot of people in wheelchairs, and many of them, he said, succumbed to lives of useless self-pity. "How come I never see any of them in the newspaper?" he asked.
If Jack was the "hero," then Brian Sterner is now our most celebrated "victim." You probably know by now that
he was dumped from his wheelchair onto a jail house floor by a deputy sheriff.
The video of this event has made its way around the world, provoking the most passionate expressions of outrage from many quarters.
The deputy, a much admired co-worker by most accounts, is an African-American woman named Charlette Marshall-Jones. Though her race and gender are irrelevant to the specific events of the case, they create an inversion of the normal pattern of police abuse, where the abuser is usually white and male. In this case, the white male Sterner, at times an advocate for people with disabilities, is the victim.
Sterner wound up in jail after his specially equipped van was stopped for what appeared to be erratic driving. This aspect of the case -- whether or not the driver was a danger to others -- has received little attention. I've seen no detailed analysis, for example, of the circumstances in which it is considered safe for a quadriplegic driver to be behind the wheel.
I'm sure that abuse of the disabled is a common and terrible transgression, which should be punished in proportion to the crime. But the emotional response in this case -- even though the victim proved able enough to fly to New York and appear on the Today Show -- suggests a kind of public sentimentality that cannot be good in the long term for persons with disabilities.
I grew up in a Long Island village, called Albertson, home to a famous place called Abilities, the groundbreaking school for the disabled created by legendary advocate
Henry Viscardi. He devoted his life to creating productive lives for the disabled, a place in the world that did not require a choice between heroism and victimhood.
We in the news media, as always, are part of the problem. Until we portray disabled citizens in ways that have nothing to do with their disabilities, we will stand guilty of a great distorting cliche of vision: that the disabled are too vulnerable to be criticized.
I remember a high school journalism student, a young woman, who reported a story about a wheelchair bowling league in her neighborhood. Her story celebrated their spirit, camaraderie and courage. What she left out were the examples of their cranky dismissal of the student journalists along with their crude sexual remarks, including invitations for her to sit on their laps.
"Why didn't you put some of that in the story?" I asked her. I don't remember her exact words, but she confessed a deeply felt responsibility to portray these jerks in a positive light. Why? Because they sat in wheelchairs. And because embedded in her psyche was the master narrative that the disabled are defined by their courage to overcome obstacles.
I tried to teach her the lesson that Jack Leonard once taught me -- probably at a moment when I was emptying his urine from a bag he carried: that people in wheelchairs are people first. That means that -- just like the rest of us -- they are blessed and damned by the contradictory burdens of the human condition. There is so much more to all of us than the simple dichotomy of hero and victim.
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Why do you think the news media portray persons with disabilities in the narrow terms of victim or hero? Feel free to share stories you have seen, or reported on, that you think break out of this mold.]
The reasons the media like to have heroes, I suspect,...
