inclusion

the camp I’m at is an ‘inclusive’ camp. Unlike an inclusive holiday, that doesn’t mean that you pay one fee for all the activities, it means that campers with educational or physical disabilities are mixed with those without.

This raises a couple of fairly interesting ideas, some of which I’m going to explore very briefly. This could be really boring.

Firstly - is inclusion a positive or a negative thing? And is it a real thing? In ‘real life’ you could argue that we practice inclusion, we don’t practice euthanasia on babies born with conditions that society deems ‘abnormal’ or ‘disabled’ and so we practice inclusion from the word go. But then we have special schools and special work places for people with both types of disability, we hospitalize and medicate them, we judge and exclude them.

Personally I think inclusion is a nonsense in that we should all be practicing it anyway. I was talking to the camp director today and I told her how I would demonstrate the futility of the idea of inclusion; get a bunch of Mr Potato Head dolls and instead of eyes and mouths, I’d have pins with ‘good a math’,’ blue eyes’, ‘great comedy timing’, ‘autism’ and ‘down syndrome’. The point being that fundamentally, we’re all Mr Potato Head dolls.

One thing that I don’t agree with is the idea that people have to be financially independent. I know that it’s the American dream and all but it’s fundamentally broken. If we’re fortunate, we need to share our fortune. I’m up for re-distribution of wealth, however I also am for Yachts. Life is full of contradictions.

It’s easy to say that the people who have a disability are the ones that benefit from inclusion but really, it’s the people without. Working and living in the kind of inclusion that is practiced here is really eye-opening. I keep saying that we’re all the same and that we just need to look after each other. Here they do just that, it’s pretty refreshing.