When I go to work in the morning, I see a disabled child be brought to school in a taxi and enter the building through a separate entrance. It is clear that the level of our culture is taken into account – one can hardly expect from a few hundreds of our schoolchildren and their parents to show necessary delicacy toward that child and one tries to avoid the situation, in which the absolutely right step to integrate him into the society will turn into a tragedy for that schoolchild. Such a problem wouldn’t have arisen in an American or a European school – such children stand in a line with everyone and enter the school in the general stream. Because there the other children, their parents and grandparents are taught, are told that people can be different and those differences themselves don’t testify to anything, neither advantages, nor disadvantages – everything depends on the personality of each human being, his mental and spiritual abilities. For example, what difference does it make on what chair and how the given writer or painter moves around, if he creates high-value pieces. It doesn’t testify to that person’s “heroism,” it is just that God granted him that talent. It is not common in Armenia – ordinary people don’t understand that, it is indigestible for our government that has signed thousands of European conventions denying discrimination and seem to pay lip service to those ideas. However, lo and behold, they are as tolerant as jailers of Oswenzim and cannot restrain manifestations of their narrow thinking. Naturally, they don’t lift a finger to create normal conditions for disabled people to move around – they think of it as an “unnecessary luxury.” They don’t understand that all of us need it more than disabled people, because it testifies to our moral qualities.
Moreover, those who are supposed to have a positive impact on the public opinion don’t lag behind the officials. However, few of those so-called “intellectuals” venture to swim against the stream and say that there is only ONE tolerance, i.e. toward any human being differing from you. That difference can manifest itself in physical specificities, skin color, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, political views etc. The intellectuals don’t say that – they prefer to win the crowd.
One of Ray Bradbury’s characters says that insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
