I hate to say it, but these days I’m embarrassed to be seen in public because I ride around in a wheelchair. I’m afraid that people will judge me harshly.
I swear, it’s as if Abbott and Cawthorn are engaged in some kind of cutthroat competition for the coveted title of Most Screwed Up White Guy in a Wheelchair 2021.
Worse yet, I’m a white guy in a wheelchair. It’s not an easy time to be a white guy in a wheelchair because of the way some high-profile white guys in wheelchairs have been behaving lately. Species Homo sapiens republicanus continues to devolve at warp speed right before our eyes, and white guys in wheelchairs are two of the most graphic recent illustrations of how low they can go.
There’s Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has a long history of crackpot antics. But recently he made headlines when he announced that he is rescinding the state’s mask mandate as well as allowing and encouraging businesses to reopen at 100 percent capacity. Pandemic? What pandemic?
It pains me greatly to think that, because he and I are both white guys in wheelchairs, people who pass me on the street might look at me and think, “There goes one of those guys who doesn’t give a flying damn if other people live or die.”
And then there’s Madison Cawthorn. Where do I begin to talk about him? Last November, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for the Eleventh district of North Carolina. He’s only twenty-five years old, which makes him the youngest member of Congress. He uses a wheelchair because of a car accident he was in when he was eighteen. And he’s a white guy.
Cawthorn has made it clear that he intends to make a name for himself in Congress as the rightwing antithesis of young progressive women like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. On his campaign website, he wrote, “I decided to run for Congress because I don’t want to raise a family in a country run by leftwing socialists. We need leaders who will stand up and fight AOC, The Squad, and the radical leftwing mob.”
In an interview, he said about AOC: “She’s definitely the vanguard for her party right now, and that’s something I want to be for the Republican Party.”
Cawthorn has indeed made national headlines, but not in the way he envisioned. He has been called out more than once for falsely embellishing his biography. For example, Cawthorn claimed that he was preparing to enter the U.S Naval Academy but his accident derailed that plan. But it was later revealed that Cawthorn was rejected for admission into the Academy before the accident.
Cawthorn also claimed to be in training to compete in the 2020 Paralympic Games. But several Paralympic athletes said Cawthorn never took part in any training.
And Cawthorn got a lot of attention for speaking at the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally that revved up the crowd that stormed the U.S. Capitol. Cawthorn then joined Republican members who voted to challenge the certification of Joe Biden’s election. Cawthorn also said in an interview that when the Capitol was stormed: “Fortunately, I was armed, so we would have been able to protect ourselves.”
There have also been several allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Cawthorn by women who knew him when he attended a Christian college. The women told CNN how Cawthorn took women for “fun rides” in his car, made sexual advances, and then became hostile when he was rejected.
So now I fear that when people see me they’ll think, “That’s one of those lying pistol packers who gets a thrill out of tearing up the Constitution and forcing themselves on women.”
I swear, it’s as if Abbott and Cawthorn are engaged in some kind of cutthroat competition for the coveted title of Most Screwed Up White Guy in a Wheelchair 2021.
And so I feel compelled to speak up in defense of white guys in wheelchairs. I know a lot of us quite well. Some of my best friends are white guys in wheelchairs.
And we’re definitely not at all like those two guys who are making all of those headlines.