We have such a tendency to focus on everything that a disability takes away that we lose sight of all that is still possible. This is the 21st century, where there are incredible opportunities and advancements in medicine and technology that allow people with disabilities to live “normal”, productive and very active lives.
Consider the case of Andy Phelps. At the age of 15, Andy was in a car accident that killed two of his friends and left him without the use of his hands or legs. Today Andy is a video editor, using his mouth instead of his hands to manipulate digital images.
Jordan Ballor writes:
There’s a dangerous tendency in America today to view disabilities of various kinds as insuperable barriers to productive and loving service. There is often an implicit, and sometimes explicit, disrespect of a basic feature of human dignity in the treatment of those with disabilities as merely passive recipients of government aid, the objects of public pity. The reality is that each one of us, created in the image of God, has the capacity to be a productive steward of some kind, and this reality has the potential to reshape our personal perspectives as well as our public policy.
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As Rudy Carrasco of Partners Worldwide puts it, “Every single person on the face of the planet is created in God’s image. Everybody has the same heavenly Father. Everybody has capacity, talent, and ability. Everybody has responsibility. Everybody has stewardship responsibility . . . You have a responsibility to be a steward of the resources under your control because you have a heavenly Father who has put great things inside of you and that’s waiting to be called out and developed and extracted.”Andy’s example, and others like it, should transform our thinking about disability and stewardship responsibility. It should also transform our public policy. America is facing a long-term disability challenge of monumental proportions. Recent Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) figures show that a record number of people are on disability today. As Cornell University’s Richard Burkhauser writes, “This recession-induced growth exacerbates the long time trend in SSDI program growth that has resulted in its real expenditures increasing sevenfold, from $18 billion (2010 dollars) in 1970 to $128 billion in 2010, a trend the CBO reports will result in program insolvency as early as 2016.”
The vast majority of people who go on long-term disability never leave the rolls. In many cases, this makes sense. But in other cases, the incentives of disability insurance and the assumptions implicit in our policy and our treatment of those on disability reinforces the lie that those who are disabled have nothing positive to offer. We should encourage those who are disabled, both personally and in our policy, to find ways to serve others, whether in the form of waged work or not. In some cases, this means that people will one day be able to do without public assistance. For others, this will mean serving in other ways while continuing to receive private and public aid.