Posted by
AudiR10TDI on Sunday, September 23, 2007 9:00:09 AM
TORONTO (September 23, 2007) -- It is only a few weeks until the Petit Le Mans, my favourite race in North America not only for its superb racing, but for the last chance to see my friends and recap the season around campfires among the trees at Turn 10. And as usual, the battle to get from Hartsfield Airport to Road Atlanta is heating up. I cannot drive (not “I choose not to” drive) and Road Atlanta, sad to say, is one of those courses that is accessible only by car.
The reason “I can’t” drive is that I am blind in one eye. This is something I have expected since I was about 10 years old; it is a genetic time bomb that my pediatrician told us about back in the 1950s. There is nothing to be done about it except wait for it to happen, which would be unannounced and could well be untriggered. My parents did what they could to shield me from it -- no gym classes (which was fine with me), limited as far as possible participating in the kinds of activities that might yield a bumped head, and so on. I was spared until my mid-fifties, and thank God I lost only the sight in one eye; it happened without any warning and after extensive tests it was determined that this was in fact what the doctor had said would happen one day. The immediate effect was the loss of my driving license. The other eye can go just as the first eye went, with no warning at all; naturally the risk of this happening while I am on the Autobahn or somewhere like that, or perhaps on a dark back road in rural Georgia, cannot be run. Since I have been sort of prepared for this all my life, I have taken care to structure my life so that I can cope with the aftershocks. Sometimes it is difficult. Frequently it is expensive. Sometimes it cannot be done.
I have been coping at Road Atlanta in various ways. I always try to cadge a ride, and if that fails I can usually find a shuttle or something going within a few miles of the track. This year the only remaining shuttle has disappeared, and the only other option is a $150.00 each way private limousine.
The same situation arose in Champ Cars as a street race has been relocated to a natural road course that is absolutely impossible for those who do not drive to attend. (The race at this track was originally cancelled because of the very small audience it drew for this reason). People who pointed out that this move would prevent a lot of people from attending were called Whiners, and worse. But as the discussion grew more heated, the difficulty has becomeo one of semantics. It seems that most people no longer understand the difference between “I can’t” and “I choose not to”.
Many years ago I took a course called Positive Mental Attitude, and one of the things this course stressed was that many people who said “I can’t” did not mean that they were physically or mentally incapable of performing the action. What they meant was “I choose not to” or “I refuse to”. A person who says “I can’t stay late tonight” means that she does not want to stay late tonight; a person who says “I can’t” speak in public means “I refuse to” speak in public. During the course of this class, most of us learned to sort out the very small pool of things we in fact could not do from the majority of things we simply did not want to do, refused to do, or for some other reason decided to blow off. Sorting things out like this is an excellent way to prove to oneself that one is not in fact as helpless and limited as one has convinced oneself is the case; and for most of us it was both a relief and an embarrassment to realize that this was true.
But this does not mean that there is NOTHING that qualifies under the rubric of “I can’t” and that is where most people fall off the rails. I am dysnumeric; that is, I cannot manipulate numbers in the same way that a dyslexic person cannot manipulate words. In the fifties and early sixties when I was in school, nobody knew about dyslexia or dysnumeria. My teachers called us Lazy and Careless. A person who was a demonstrated genius in many fields could not possibly be handicapped in one. I was in my thirties before I was diagnosed, and when the burden lifted from my back it was landed on the backs of those who had spent a lifetime telling me that there was nothing wrong with me except that I did not want to learn my times tables or do mental arithmetic or dial a long distance telephone number. (The brain problem includes an inability to orient myself in space -- tell right from left or reproduce a map or draw, andI was actually jeered at in public by a teacher for my inability to draw.) When I was diagnosed, other members of the family admitted that they too had the same difficulties and the clear path was tracked back in the family for at least 100 years.
Likewise a person who cannot drive is not necessarily a person who chooses not to drive. So jeering at people as Whiners and demanding that they get a driving license and rent a car, which you assume because you can do it is an option open to all, is a knee jerk assumption that is going to come back and bite you. The person who told me that he could not imagine in this day and age that anybody would not have a driving license and a car was publicly embarrassed when I told him the reason I had neither. His protest that I should have explained up front that I am handicapped was, surprisingly, rejected by the majority of the other people listening to the discussion. It should not be necessary for people to trumpet their handicaps to avoid being jeered at and mocked by those whose handicaps are different. Just because you, yourself, mean “I choose not to” give you a ride when you say “I can’t”, it is a good idea to examine your true meaning -- is it in fact true that you cannot, or is the truth that you choose not to? -- and if you are not honest enough to say you do not want to, not to assume that other people are equally dishonest.
Notice that I am not saying you have to do things that you do not want to do. What I am saying is (1) be honest enough to examine your “I can’t” and admit it if it is really an “I choose not to” and (2) ask the person who says “I can’t” if there is a reason she can’t before mocking and jeering and assuming that she is not telling the truth. Because although it is perfectly respectable to say that you do not want to or choose not to do something, sometimes people who say they cannot do something really mean it.