First published at WAMU's The Conversation.
When I was in college in England I had a friend who was blind. George had been struck with a blunt object when he was a young boy. He had little recollection of having seen anything. Going to the pub with George, however, was always fun. George knew how to enjoy a drink, but ordinary British pub-going folk were oftentimes too intimidated by his disability to proposition him directly. "I'd love to buy him a drink....." they would say. "Then ask him if he wants one..." would be my response. He usually did. Then they would offer him cash. "Put it in the poor box" George would say.
At least they noticed him.
I remembered this while I waited on a tense, crowded, heated, and quite terrifying platform at Washington DC's Metro Center on Thursday night, to change from the Red Line to the Blue/Orange. The colored route terminology, of course, makes life no easier for the visually-challenged, but never mind.
A young African-American woman dressed in a sharp gray suit and solid heels was trying to cut her way through the crowd with her long white stick. A mass of preoccupied, twittering, texting, and simultaneously spacially-challenged citizens of the District formed a wall in front of her and she wavered and wandered down the platform towards a brick barrier underneath the escalator bank. "Are you OK miss?" I asked pathetically before she banged into the station wall. "I'm trying to find my way out" she laughed with the sort of ironic sense-of-humor which is a prerequisite of the partially sighted if they are seeking help.
I took her arm and tried to steer her towards the escalator entrance. Still the home-going masses poured forward oblivious and preoccupied. From the other direction came another stick-wielding partially-sighted person. In a scene which would have been much more marketable in the days before political correctness in slapstick comedy, they collided in front of the down escalator and I narrowly averted a mass-casualty disaster by physically manhandling the pair of them onto the up-escalator. As the "Metro Customers" going down carried on regardless, I made a note to strengthen my personal liability insurance (at least I could read the small print).
On the return journey a blue-eyed, silver-haired, slim and smartly-dressed young man was waiting on the platform at the spot where the very back of the metro train should stop. He was wheel-chair bound. When the train came in, it was full. Again, the masses poured out, and their replacement masses poured in. I beckoned the man to go ahead but he saw the crowd inside the carriage and gestured me to get in before him. Fortunately, a gap appeared by accident and he inched his vehicle inside.
The message is clear. If you are disabled, don't travel during rush-hour. You'll risk even more inhumanity than usual. Unless you have to, of course.
