As a blogger, I just wanted to write about the Paralympics, hoping more people can see about the Paralympics. (I'm a Libran and I love things to be balanced.)
So I decided to write about Paralympics.
Also I think we hear mostly about the Paralympians from the country on the local media where we live, so as a Japanese living in New Zealand, I'm going to write about the New Zealand and World Paralympians in Japanese at http://paralympics-japan.blogspot.co.nz and about the Japanese Paralympians in English here.
I've heard about 'Inspiration Po*n' (using * in the word so that the search engines do not think this page is about po*n.), the term which was created by Stella Young.
I've read We're not here for your inspiration By ABC's Stella Young.
Also watched the TED video:
She says we tend to be inspired by the people with disabilities even though they are only doing their everyday things, and have done nothing special. This actually means we have very low expectatioins on the people with disabilities.
We are looking at the people with disabilities as an object for our inspiration. I take her point.
Having said that, I think we might never know what the intentions of others are. We can't assume anything without asking.
She said in the above article that a woman commented "I see you on the train every morning and I just wanted to say it's great. You're an inspiration to me."
She wondered if she should have replied "you too?" because she was just doing exactly what the woman was doing.
Let's just expand our imagination a little.
Can we assume the woman was comparing herself with Stella?
Maybe the woman has a family member, who has a similar condition to Stella, but he/she is not able to get on a train at the moment. Or perhaps she is a teacher or occupational therapist working with someone with a similar condition. Or maybe she, herself, is suffering from a physical or mental illness.
If so, what she said might have a slightly different meaning, don't you think?
The woman didn't know enough about Stella, and Stella didn't know enough about the woman.
I hope they had a chance to talk more after the woman said it to her. (Otherwise the woman might now be feeling very embarrassed if she notices it's her in Stella's story.)
The word 'inspiration' can have different meanings depending on how the word is said and how the word is heard.
I'm often inspired by Paralympians, but it is in the same way as I'm inspired by Olympians.
They all do something I can't do. They practice hard for a chance, which only comes once in 4 years!!!
But somehow, we see less about Paralympians than Olympians.
I think if we know more about each competitor, we will stop focusing on their disabilities and start focusing on the individual person.
That's why this blog is trying to focus on each Paralympian's story.
As a Japanese living in New Zealand (I've been here more than 20 years!!!), it is often my experience that people see me as a Japanese and don't see me as an individual person. I think this is because they have no idea about me as an individual person, so they rely on the information they already know about Japanese.
I especially don't like that people think I'm a rich, never-been-through-hardships, spoiled Japanese. (I'm just always smiling and being polite, but a Japanese, or anyone, can have been through a lot more than they appear to have. And I've never been rich!!! So let's stop overcharging or underpaying people based on their race and appearance!!! :-))
I hope this blog will somehow help balance the Olympics and Pralaympics coverage on the media.
September, 2016
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