Advocating for people with special needs and disabilities always seems like a good thing, right? Well, many people say this, but they don’t actually want to make adjustments when they feel it “negatively” affects their own lives. Well, that type of faux-activist attitude has got to go. The Ruderman Family Foundation thinks so too, considering they just made a campaign calling those kinds of attitudes out.
The “Make Room” campaign was made in conjunction with Bizchut and Link20, which is an organization aimed to promoting and empowering young people with disabilities, founded by the Ruderman Family Foundation. The video focuses on the fact that people with disabilities are often excluded from communities under the guise that they should be part of their own communities. The reasons offered are numerous–and all veiled in euphemisms about how it’s “better” for people with special needs to live “elsewhere.”
What are the reasons? Well, in the video, many people with disabilities are recorded giving the answers, such as:
“He will be lonely here.
This is a normal neighborhood.
Property prices will go down.
Our children don’t need to see that.
It’s better for him to live with people who are like him.”
That’s just a few, but those few probably made you cringe. And they should. Because those “reasons” are not real and they’re not OK. Just because someone is different doesn’t mean they don’t belong or should be excluded.
It’s amazing to see organization promote positive change and demand to create a more inclusive world. Check out the video below:
