){kind=logo}
){kind=icon}
){kind=logo}
){kind=icon}
In memory of Gaby Brimmer.
In recent months, I’ve been watching a lot of videos (I don’t know if they’re TikToks, shorts, reels, or what) in which people with Down Syndrome or other genetic variations, dysmorphia, physical alterations due to illness or accident (at birth or later) appear – in short, people we call “different,” who testify about how their lives have been, their difficulties, people’s attitudes in their environment. Generally, they show great aptitude for functioning and living smoothly in the world. They offer advice to those who are in similar situations, denounce those who are not, and, above all, express an enthusiastic and determined desire to communicate.
Many lines of thought rush to mind when I talk about the subject. One is about the “difference”: I wonder how different all these people are from me, compared, for example, to my neighbor—a completely “normal” person—who has threatened to kill my cats if they keep coming near her parking spot. I also wonder about the “monstrosity” of the girl I saw yesterday in one of those videos, whose face was transformed by a burn in childhood, compared, again, with the “monstrosity” of the children who, according to her, mistreated her as a child (it would be more precise to say “hurt and terrorized” her) and of the teachers who did nothing about it and even blamed her for the harm that the other children did to her.
I think of a thousand things, so I will try to put my ideas in some order.
To begin with, I thank my algorithm and all those applications that have detected my interest in people who, in general, are neither seen nor heard, at least not by the people around me. In my daily life, I must say, people with Down Syndrome and Cerebral Palsy are, without a doubt, the most present. In fact, my interest in listening to them and seeing them (turning my ear and gaze to what has always been silent and hidden) began when, about ten years ago, I came across the videos of the Spaniard Pablo Pineda, the first graduate in the world with Down syndrome (I think). Let’s not go any further into the point: you have to see and hear Pablo to understand the new human order. I now contemplate with joy the proliferating testimonies and examples of many other girls and boys with the same syndrome; now they give lectures, earn academic degrees, aspire to political positions, are expert gymnasts and models, etc.
I also know (hopefully, my algorithm is not fooling me!) that all those messages flooding my screen represent something that is just beginning in society.
Regarding people with cerebral palsy, I want to share something personal and important to me. I met Gaby Brimmer many years ago. There is a book about her, written by Elena Poniatowska, and also a film, directed by Mexican filmmaker Luis Mandoki. Luis coordinated (in the early eighties) a theater group in which Gaby participated and which I joined. Gaby was a poet and writer. She did this by typing on her electric typewriter with her (right?) big toe, the only part of her body she could move precisely. The rest of her body language was—I mean to put it this way— her own; original, shall we say. She spoke in a way that her nanny, Florencia, deciphered with agility, but for us, her friends and acquaintances, it made us confront our own clumsiness. She moved her arms and stretched her entire body in ways anyone seeing would call “spasmodic,” but it was just her way of moving and expressing herself. In my memory, now that Gaby has passed away (what I would give to see her again!), those movements were as articulate and expressive as those of any genuine and eloquent person.
Gaby had adopted a daughter, Alma, whom she and Florencia educated, very much under the always progressive precepts of my friend. (I boast of having been her friend: after the theater sessions, I visited her at her house; she dedicated a beautiful poem to me. In fun and deep talks—because she also formed words with letters using her big toe—she made me share intimate confessions, for which I am wholeheartedly grateful.
She raised her daughter, attended university, acted in theater, and wrote the script for her own film; I can add several etceteras. On top of all this, one of her most important achievements was to be a pioneer in the fight to highlight the skills of disabled people (As I have said, I don’t know how much more disabled they are than those who harm others just because of the way they speak or move, or because of their physical appearance).
I do not want to minimize the gap that we have opened —and that we are still unable to close— between those of us who have always had the right to show ourselves in public and those who, for generations, were, and have been, deprived of it (I think, yes, that this is, and has always been, the main difference between one and the other; the most profound and disabling gap dividing everyone; of course, not to mention those “civilizations” that erased those that they wanted to hide, eliminating people).
But much less do I want to insist on pointing out as “objective” some differences that, as many of us know, exist due to a good degree of subjectivity and prejudice, if not outright superstition. Some who argue in favor of this objectivity remember that feline mothers eliminate the offspring that “turn out badly”: they decapitate or eat them. However, those of us who have witnessed something like this in domestic pets know very well that these offspring, at first glance, looked as healthy as the others. We may think that the mother detected “hidden” differences (that we could not detect), or that she responded instinctively to some condition in the environment, or, plainly, she was wrong. So if the argument is valid, we can conclude that, if human selection followed patterns like these, who knows how many of us would have been eaten or beheaded by our mothers at birth, and not necessarily because of our physical characteristics, but perhaps because of conditions that humanity has come to leverage. To put it this way: if there were no forces (internal or external, God knows) that prevented teachers from eating the “bad” students, Einstein’s mathematics teacher, given the terrible aptitudes he showed in this subject, would have devoured him.
We are savages. I, if I act humanely (although, viscerally, it is difficult for me to do so), I vindicate, like everyone, my neighbor, and this even though she wants to kill my cats, because, as she says, they chew the cables of her car; yet, at the same time, I demand (joining many who already do so) that we stop harming others just because we have differences. If a girl suffered a very serious burn as a child, we must make her feel good; if someone needs patience to be understood, we should give it to them gladly; if someone is moving slowly, let’s stop and consider why we are in a hurry.
Let’s also change our narrow aesthetic patterns: let’s familiarize our gaze with the appearance of all kinds of people. Not everyone is lucky enough to look as beautiful as we, the privileged ones of the standard physiognomy. (I mean, those with two symmetrical ears and two eyes over an axial nose and mouth, as well as a trunk and four limbs, all within the proportions of what we call “normality”, standard physiognomy that we proudly wear above those who do not enjoy that radiant symmetry. These include those who have tumors, holes where there should be eyes or a nose, one ear or none; those who have skin applied to substitute for missing eyelids; those who have transferred muscle, bone and fatty tissue from one place to another in the body (to mention a few examples) to make their lives more pleasant and less difficult to live with us, the symmetrical, beings —who, contrarily, are incapable of correcting our rude neural network to become less frightening, prejudiced superstitious, selfish and arrogant.
My protest goes even further: I expose now the social obligation imposed on all of us (like “necessary” measures of a dictator), to hide those aspects of us that do not conform to standards, to remain silent about our “monstrosities”, and to sacrifice our personality for the sake of collective cruelty.
For every dictator, there is a secretary. Understand it like this: for a boss who dictates, there is always someone capable of keeping secrets. I am talking about a dictatorship much more widespread than that of a single individual, i.e., a dictatorship of all over all, in truth ubiquitous, subconscious, so internalized that it becomes self-inflicted: from one to oneself. You have to learn it: “To every dictator, a secretary; to every repressor, someone willing to be repressed.”
I don’t understand why we can’t be original, considering that, even when we’re alike, we are still unhappy. It can be argued that coexistence does not allow for frequent exceptions, differences that are too disruptive, and that we must all do our part. However, the truth is, at this moment I am not in the mood to admit these limitations: we have normalized too many crimes that put us at risk, we have become apathetic (we have done little ourselves) in the face of monstrosities that truly do assault what is human, that there is no way to defend, now, our right to be scandalized by the physical, emotional or mental peculiarities of those close to us.
As you can see, I am in favor of differences and opposed to a world divided into “different” and “not different”; against characterizing “disabilities” primarily by what is visible, when it is in the invisible where the most pronounced ones hide, among them, those who do the most damage to themselves and others (damage, in general, directly proportional to the degree to which we hide them, to the effort we make to keep them locked up).
The time we live in is cruel. As a society, as many times in the past, we are repeating the tragedy of forging aspirations that exceed our possibilities. It is human history. However, in the dark panorama, something new is appearing, or at least something not seen in a long time: Today, we all have the right to go out on the street, symmetrical and asymmetrical, typical and divergent. We can all go to the plaza, the market, the café; get on public transport or a plane; attend school, get a job, be film artists or influencers… We can all openly defend our differences and those of our… our… sorry, what do you call those who, for different reasons, are our fellow men?
I know I sound optimistic… but I am talking about a beginning. There is still much to do, to understand, to communicate. Courage—for those of us who have remained silent—is a kind of resurrection. Not only can something be done personally, but also socially. When we laugh at those who want to change the world, it is because we are afraid that the world will change in our own hands. What would we do with it? Let it fall?
I continue talking.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
){kind=icon}
){kind=icon}
This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
