Crippen Cartoons cartoons at the cutting edge of disability

Apart from the fact that we don’t physically get out on the streets anymore and shout about our rights as disabled people, there’s been a resounding lack of complaint from mainstream society about the way that this government are chopping apart our equality legislation.

I think one of the main reasons is that we have disappeared into the modern equivalent of a ghetto; we’ve changed our analogue lives for one where we reside digitally – online.

As far as the public are concerned because they don’t generally access our specialised blogs and social media pages, we’ve disappeared and no longer present as a viable candidate for equality anyway.

I know that it is much more accessible to live our lives online rather than struggling to overcome the many barriers that confront us in the ‘real’ world. We share our lives and our experiences online, we communicate online, and we create and generate our ideas online. But the downside of this is that we have disappeared off the mainstream radar.

I’d argue that we’ve pretty much gone full circle to where we were a couple of decades ago when to see a disabled person out and about was a rarity, with the general public having little or no awareness of our rich and colourful community. The assumption that we live in care homes and are ‘cared for’ and that we don’t actually go out to work or hold any position of responsibility seems to be how we are viewed once more.

In my last blog I had a rant again about how Boris and his cronies are systematically taking apart any protection that we had in the form of legislation and that no one seems to be doing anything about it.

Perhaps it’s time to get back out on the streets again and remind the public that we do exist and that we haven’t conveniently gone away.

Hello … is anyone there?!

Description of cartoon for those using screen reading software

A young female wheelchair user is saying hello to a little boy. The boy is with his father and is asking him: “What is that dad?”. The father replies: “They’re called the disabled – didn’t realise they still existed!”