2009 MDA telethon
Sometimes, when I’m feeling down and in need of encouragement, I ask a person under the age of thirty if they’ve heard of the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon.
The show’s shallow depiction of the lives of disabled people only made things worse for many of us.
More and more often, that person has no idea what I’m talking about. And hearing that makes me feel hopeful. If the telethon, which last appeared on television in 2014, is as thoroughly forgotten as it deserves to be, I feel that maybe our society is becoming more enlightened and equitable after all.
But now the MDA has announced that a new version of the telethon will air for two hours on October 24. It’s called The MDA Kevin Hart Kids Telethon because it’s hosted by comedian Kevin Hart. Yikes! The year 2020 has taken yet another hideous turn!
When I attempt to explain what the telethon once was to those who have never heard of it, they often look at me with astonishment, as if I must be making the whole thing up. I tell them that for decades, every Labor Day weekend there was a twenty-one-hour television show that raised millions of dollars for the MDA.
The entertainment portion of the show, I explain, had a heavy cheesy Vegas vibe and featured a host of stale “celebrities” on the downside of their careers. The fundraising portion featured the pity pitch, where kids with muscular dystrophy and their families pleaded with viewers to call the number on the screen and make a pledge so MDA can find a cure and save these poor children!
It was an image of disability that was stuck in the 1950s. So disabled folks across the country, myself included, spent a chunk of our Labor Day weekends protesting the telethon, mostly by picketing local stations broadcasting it.
Our message was that the show’s shallow depiction of the lives of disabled people only made things worse for many of us. The telethon put forth the notion that the only way for a disabled person’s life to be meaningful was to find a cure. And the way to a cure was to donate to a behemoth charity.
It presented disability as a purely medical problem that only doctors and medical science can solve. It placed the obligation on disabled people to fit into the parameters of society by getting normalized.
But the disability rights movement puts forth the opposite message. It insists that it is the obligation of society to genuinely welcome the participation of disabled people as we are and to adjust its parameters to accommodate us all. It says that many of the barriers that exclude us are political in nature. A step on the entrance of a building, for example, should be removed or ramped or not constructed in the first place rather than expecting me to acquire the ability to scale it.
The myriad barriers that exclude disabled people are born of an attitude that devalues us by associating disability with helplessness and hopelessness. And the propaganda of the telethon nurtures that attitude. It reinforces those barriers by telling viewers that their only obligation toward disabled people is to call the number on the screen. It lets everyone off the hook for doing the painstaking work of making our society genuinely welcoming and accessible.
The last few Labor Day weekends have been nice and relaxing with no telethon to protest. But now it looks like we’ll have to gear back up again. We can’t go back to the 1950s. Life was much more desolate for disabled people back then.