My wife often accuses me of being shameless. She means the good kind of shameless. I take it as high praise. I appreciate her saying I’m shameless. I only wish it were true. I’m not nearly as shameless as I aspire to be. But I’m working on it.
The last time she said I was shameless was when we were discussing this disabled woman who wrote on Facebook about being hounded by internet trolls. They were saying that cripples like her, with our selfish government programs and civil rights laws, are a burden on decent taxpayers and ought to be locked up in institutions. My wife wondered why some people say such hateful things. I shrugged and said, “They’re idiots.”
I’m not nearly as shameless as I aspire to be. But I’m working on it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it’s important to understand the root causes of things so we can treat the disease and not just the symptoms and all that. We need to know why people shame and degrade others. But that’s what psychiatrists and sociologists are for. I don’t have time for it. When people attempt to shame me, I just try to remind myself that they’re idiots and not let them bog me down. That’s what several decades of trying to become shameless has done to me.
My goal, in fact, is to achieve a state of utter and complete shamelessness, where I absorb no shame. It ain’t easy. I’m sixty-one years old and still at it. I suppose I should take a minute here to explain the difference between good shameless and bad shameless. Good shameless, to me, is drag queen-type shamelessness—strutting and flaunting that which you are supposed to hide. It is the polar opposite of apologizing for who you are. Bad shameless is NRA-type shamelessness that will do or say anything to advance a self-serving agenda, no matter who gets hurt.
I didn’t set out on a conscious quest to be shameless. It just sort of evolved as a defense mechanism. Cripples are assaulted throughout our lives by shame in many forms. It’s easy to unconsciously buy into it all if you’re not careful. And when that happens we’re stuck in the mud because shame makes you timid. You have to develop the capacity to recognize shame for what it is and tell it to go piss off. Being shameless is important not just for cripples. To be a powerful activist is to be filled to overflowing with that good kind of shamelessness. The more the better.
When I was a teenager, there used to be these cripple charity telethons. Thank God they no longer exist. Telethons were live television programs that were many hours long. Much like public television pledge drives, an enthused pitchman or pitchwoman stood in front of a phone bank of volunteers in the studio, urging viewers to phone in a pledge to support this wonderful cripple charity. The granddaddy of them all was the Labor Day weekend telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, hosted by comedian Jerry Lewis. At its peak, it was twenty-one hours long and broadcast coast to coast. The only cripples that ever appeared on the telethon were children who expressed monosyllabic gratitude for everyone’s pledges.
I felt insulted by this. There weren’t any cripples like me on the telethon— teenagers who were just trying to get laid. Who would give money to a cripple like that? So the telethon made me cringe every year because, like a lot of teenage boys, I wanted above all else to be taken seriously, especially by women. I wanted to distance myself from all things childlike. But the telethon was vigorously reinforcing the old notion that cripples were all just innocuous Tiny Tims, whose only desire and hope was to be cured, because this simplistic narrative was the easiest route to the viewers’ wallets.
The telethon was vigorously reinforcing the old notion that cripples were all just innocuous Tiny Tims, whose only desire and hope was to be cured, because this simplistic narrative was the easiest route to the viewers’ wallets.
But it wasn’t harmless rhetoric. I knew it was going to be hard enough for me, and for these kids on the telethon as well, to emerge from adolescence into adulthood without having to machete our way through all that. Who would ever go on a date with Tiny Tim? I was rejecting the shaming of pity. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines pity as “sympathetic sorrow for one suffering, distressed, or unhappy.” In order to welcome the pity of others, I had to see myself as “suffering, distressed, or unhappy” as a result of being crippled. This was laughably absurd to me, even as an adolescent. And the idea that the suffering I felt could be alleviated by a donation to a behemoth cripple charity was even more absurd. Those, I can see now, were my first baby steps on the road to shamelessness. I was going through political puberty.
About a decade later, in the early 1980s, I took another step toward shamelessness. At the time, the entrances of all Chicago Transit Authority buses and nearly every rapid transit station had steps, so anyone who couldn’t scale stairs was completely shut out from using public transit. The CTA, responding to new federal requirements, instituted a door-to-door transportation service for cripples. Just order up a ride and a wheelchair-accessible vehicle will come to your door and whisk you to your destination. But dial-a-ride was a pathetic substitute. There were about twenty vehicles serving thousands of people, so often when you called for a ride, even a day in advance, none were available. When you did get a ride, dial-a-ride vehicles were notoriously late. And the hours of operation were extremely limited—9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends. This was the shaming of segregation.
Once again, when I was expected to feel gratitude, I felt insulted. Fresh out of college and trying to enjoy the big city, I especially didn’t appreciate the 5 p.m. cripple curfew on a Saturday night. So I took up with other cripples who were also insulted by the limitations of dial-a-ride to form the Chicago chapter of the activist group ADAPT. Our demand was that all new public transit vehicles and stations be wheelchair accessible, which they are today. What I loved about my fellow activists was their shamelessness. To quietly accept the inferiority of diala-ride required internalizing a great deal of shame. You had to believe you didn’t deserve any better. These activists refused to do that. And believe me, the CTA cranked up its shaming machine full blast when ADAPT was protesting. According to the CTA’s propaganda, our demands for full access to the mainline public transportation system would cause fares to skyrocket. Loading passengers in wheelchairs onto buses and trains would cause long delays. They were trying to give us guilty consciences and thus make us retreat. The key to not succumbing to this shame tsunami was recognizing it as the bullshit that it was and pressing on.
I want to be shameless because the shameless are the ones who lead the fight against austerity. The austerity hawks are hurling a lot of hand grenades of shame these days: “Look at those parasitic poor people!” That’s because the austerity hawks rely heavily on shaming to succeed. It’s a whole lot easier for them to accomplish their goal if the targets of their austerity accept the idea that they don’t deserve any better and quietly struggle to get by with less and less. But the shameless are insulted by these transparent tactics. They laugh at the shame grenades as they swat them away.
They laugh at the shame grenades as they swat them away.
That’s one quality most shameless people seem to have in common. They laugh a lot. Shedding the burden of shame is very liberating. It makes you giddy. Humor defangs shame. Again I turn to Merriam-Webster’s for clarity and find the very first definition of humor to be “a normal functioning bodily semifluid or fluid.” Oops. But farther down there’s another definition: “that quality which appeals to a sense of the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous.” The most evolved of the shameless find the notion that they should feel ashamed or guilty about who they are or what they need to be ludicrous and absurdly incongruous. They are the most fortified. They are immune from the toxicity of shame, or at least as close to immune as one can be. I don’t know if it’s possible to be completely shameless. But I’ll keep trying until I die.
Mike Ervin, a writer and disability rights activist in Chicago, writes the blog Smart Ass Cripple at smartasscripple.blogspot.com. His most recent book is Smart Ass Cripple’s Little Chartreuse Book.