Liar liar, pants on fire!

Lie Number Two:

“Special needs are special.”

I’ve been meaning to catch up for lunch with Sarah for some time. She’s a really good friend. But we’re both busy with work, and life gets in the way, so we occasionally send memes and banana-crazy videos on socials. Adulting is a hoax. Kids, don’t be fooled into it! Anywho, that aside. Let’s say Sarah and I finally set that long-awaited date for brunch at a scenic restaurant on the mall’s first floor. Think of any mall; go wild and stretch your imagination taut. Plug this into context; I walk; Sarah’s a wheelchair user. Here are my navigation options to the restaurant; the lift, the ramp, the staircase, or the escalators. Sarah’s menu reads; the lift or ramp. She’s a wheelchair user, so obviously, the stairs and escalators are an unnecessary task. Yet, our needs do not vary simply because our means to acquire our shared needs do. Think deeply about this. We both ‘need’ to get to the first floor, right? So, there’s nothing ‘special’ about what Sarah ‘needs.’ She needs what I need, and I need what she needs. The end. Our means are what differ. Her means may be unique, but not her needs.

“Special needs” may have been a great idea in its intentions. But, an incomplete understanding of a great idea is never good. There’s no ‘need’ that a person with a disability has that a non-disabled person hasn’t. We all need to be loved, to be educated, to be mobile, to communicate, to thrive. Sure, how we acquire our needs vary, but uniqueness in our needs does not exist. To be ‘special,’ something must be unusual or uncommon. A person who eats with a spoon needs to eat, as does a person using a feeding tube. The feeding tube is not a ‘need’ but a ‘tool.’ What’s unique is the method they eat. A method is not a need but rather an assistive device to the core need.

Special needs collapse into the weird idea that Persons with disabilities have a need so unique or special from what is human. A fish needs water to breathe because it has gills. That’s a very ‘special need’ that no human will ever require. We do not have gills, but should you have aquatic aspirations to live fully as a mermaid or merman, then ‘gills’ are definitely a ‘special need.’ We’re species apart, fish and I. Often weaving into a list of unusual needs to integrate. Persons with disabilities and Non-Disabled people, thankfully, are of the same species. Ideally, we have the exact requirements to thrive. We needn’t more clarity than this. Yet, I’ve travelled vastly, and all ingest this strange belief that Persons With Disabilities have ‘special needs.’ Which shall forever beg the question in my mind; ‘what’s so special about special needs?’