{"id":1243,"date":"2006-06-13T21:43:14","date_gmt":"2006-06-13T21:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1243"},"modified":"2006-06-13T21:43:14","modified_gmt":"2006-06-13T21:43:14","slug":"uppity_gimps_ne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1243","title":{"rendered":"Uppity Gimps Need Not Apply"},"content":{"rendered":"

“If I had no legs, I wouldn’t enter for the London Marathon.”  With these words, Guardian columnist Alexander Chancellor launches into a somewhat oblique criticism of the “political” efforts of employers to hire people with disabilities<\/A>.  So as not to come across as too much of a…well…dick, he first praises us supercripples who are “triumphantly successful” in our chosen careers.  He notes the accomplishments of a renowned percussionist who happens to be deaf, but the strain of trying to conceal his true nature must have been too much for him, because he then writes, “Why she wanted to embark on this career, and how she has succeeded at it, I cannot imagine.”  That a person who is deaf might possess a deep love for music seems to be a fact that he can’t entirely square with his tragically limited worldview. <\/DIV>
 <\/DIV>
By the end of the column, we learn that the source of Chancellor’s grumbling appears to be a letter carrier who has dyslexia and failed to deliver several hundred pieces of mail.  But in the course of his grousing, Chancellor seems to be charging some of us for not knowing our place.  “It is still a mystery to me why people should be determined to do the one thing for which fate has sought to disqualify them,” he writes.  Couldn’t the same be said of someone who rises out of poverty or some other life trauma to achieve success?  Sometimes, reach exceeds grasp, no doubt about it.  But what Chancellor calls “fate” is what many of us would call “prejudice” or “ignorance.”  <\/DIV>
 <\/DIV>
The real mystery to me is why the Alexander Chancellors of the world get paid for their ill-informed ramblings while talented young bloggers toil away in obscurity.  <\/DIV><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“If I had no legs, I wouldn’t enter for the London Marathon.”  With these words, Guardian columnist Alexander Chancellor launches into a somewhat oblique criticism of the “political” efforts of employers to hire people with disabilities.  So as not to come across as too much of a…well…dick, he first praises us supercripples who are “triumphantly […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-k3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}