I can’t make them care

Along with being Disability Awareness Month, October is also Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transexual History Month and National Cyber Security Awareness Month, to name a few. With all these great causes clamoring for attention, the individual messages of each cause get somewhat lost.

As the president of a University Northern Iowa student organization called Awareness for Individuals with Disabilities, I helped organize a few events this month to raise disability awareness and make our message audible. It was during one of these events that I realized something very important: I can’t make people care.

Erik Anderson, a man who makes his living giving speeches on disability awareness and performing magic across the Midwest, said something during his speech at UNI Oct. 13 that stuck with me and has changed the way I look at myself.

He said that a person usually doesn’t care about something until it touches his or her life. And he is right. It took a lot of courage and self-scrutiny to realize that if I had never had brain surgery (which resulted in a visual disability) I would not be the president of a disability awareness student organization right now. I would like to think better of myself and believe that I would still care about disability awareness even if I didn’t have a disability, but it is true that I probably wouldn’t.

A lot of the students who attended our events did so for extra credit or volunteer hours. There were only a few who attended out of sheer curiosity or for a personal reason. However, disability awareness does affect everyone, so everyone should care. Unlike cancers or cyber security breaches, disabilities can affect the entire population. Why? Because we are all aging and becoming more likely to have a disability with every birthday we celebrate. Individuals with disabilities are the largest minority in the United States. This number will only increase with the population, especially in the next decade or two when the baby boomers age even more.

I agree, it is tough for students to care about the Americans with Disabilities Act or how accessible the University of Northern Iowa campus is now when a disability won’t personally affect most people’s lives until 50 years from now.  It’s also tough to care about cancer unless you have it or have watched a close relative go through it.

Does this mean we shouldn’t care? Of course not. The problem is that by the time most people experience an age-related disability and the lack of accessibility that goes with it, they are too old to do anything about it.

Do you see hordes of nursing home residents going on strike, demanding more accessible towns and supermarkets? No. That is why it is important to recognize the changes that need to be made now, while we are still young enough to make them. 

I can’t make you care about disability awareness. But I can tell you that if you wait until it touches your life, it may be too late for you to do anything about it.