Handicapped parking slots are not a perk of pain

By Lois M. Collins
Deseret Morning News
Published: Wednesday, June 8, 2005 7:07 p.m. MDT
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The man, 58, can walk a very short distance fairly well. But his leg gets "jittery," the result of polio when he was a child and post-polio syndrome 50 years later, which has mostly benched him. Still, when he gets out of the car at the grocery store, he's not yet so tired he can barely crawl. That will come.

He's given up activities he's long enjoyed, parked forever his beloved motorcycle.

But he looks OK to the man behind him in the parking lot, so when he pulls into the handicapped stall, puts his placard on the rearview mirror and climbs out, that fellow guns his motor, swerves slightly toward him, as if to see if it will make him jump, and offers a loud, rude remark.

The swerve only complicates what happens later, when after too many steps in this needed trip to the store, the man with post-polio drags himself back out to his car. Only by following him through the store would the expert wordsmith see the many pauses for rest, the leaning on the pole by the cash register, the precarious balance as he lets his shopping cart help support him.

He's getting used to the mean glares and snotty remarks he sometimes gets when he parks in the handicapped stall. He'll probably never get used to the fact that his legs are unreliable.

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Only by living in his skin would the judgmental fellow know that pain dogs every step. And that's not going to happen. "I guess I told him," he's probably congratulated himself for his ugly little diatribe.

It's a story that is repeated, with variations. When the young woman wears long pants, her prosthetic leg isn't visible. And she's been accosted so many times by self-righteous — but wrong — people that she now forgoes parking in the handicapped stall at the grocery store or the concert hall, although it would make her life more pleasant.

The handicapped placard remains in the glove box most of the time, unused.

Besides choosing them for fashion, the long pants are also about privacy. She may not want to answer questions from people she doesn't know who somehow feel entitled to ask her to relive, for their education, why her leg was removed. Sharing is something she should be able to decide for herself.

Those who yell at her family don't stick around long enough to see the soreness or exhaustion at the end of even a moderate shopping trip. They don't feel how she sometimes struggles.

She got that cardboard insert that allows her to park in a handicapped stall the hard way: She has a disability that qualifies her. But it's too emotionally exhausting to argue with people who glance over and decide her family's taking advantage somehow. So she struggles when she's tired.

Things aren't always what they look like.

Their sin, shared by thousands of others, is these two don't look disabled enough, as if there were some magic level when people would stop making judgments quickly and giving them voice even faster. For whatever reason, there are folks who believe that only someone in a wheelchair qualifies for "handicapped" parking.

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