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Anita Creamer: A disabled driver vs. a mob’s stereotypes
By Anita Creamer - Bee Columnist
Last Updated 2:01 am PDT Friday, August 3, 2007
Story appeared in SCENE section, Page J1
He just wanted a couple of burgers to take home for dinner. Instead, when
Jerry Ferguson pulled into the parking lot of the In-N-Out Burger in Rancho
Cordova late Sunday afternoon, what he got was a confrontation.
A group of maybe a dozen young women – a pack of wolves, he calls them –
picked a fight with him when he walked back out to his truck, a gray Silverado
with a California Disabled Person license plate, the kind with the
handicapped symbol on it.
He’d parked in a disabled person’s parking space, and they didn’t think he
has a disability.
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“I couldn’t believe what I was putting up with,” says Ferguson, 57, who lives
in east Sacramento. "They were like a mob.
“It made me wonder if Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie” – the
real axis of evil, to some minds – "have made too big a dent in young
people’s thinking. They’ve got no respect for other people or the laws, and that
mentality is out of control."
The women looked to be college age or in their 20s, he says, just ordinary,
middle class, suburban young people.
"They said, ‘You drive an awfully nice truck for someone who’s disabled,’ "
he says, "and, ‘You walk awfully good for someone parking in a disabled
spot.’"
What an interesting set of stereotypes.
You can’t always tell someone’s disabled just by looking at him, though that
fact tends to escape people who prefer dealing in assumptions.
Someone with end-stage lung cancer won’t be on crutches, for example, and
neither will someone with a serious heart condition.
By the same token, if people are burdened with a serious deficit of
compassion or common sense, you can’t always tell that at a glance, either.
“They started screaming at me,” Ferguson says. "I ignored them and got in the
truck. And then I thought, ‘Who are they to tell me I’m not disabled?’ "
As it happens, he’s been retired from the state for the past four years, ever
since his doctor diagnosed him with severe neck problems. Through the years,
he’s suffered from a list of health issues, everything from a fractured
spine to disc problems to ulnar nerve damage.
“I don’t complain much,” he says, "because who the hell likes to hear
somebody whine?"
He can walk unassisted, but that doesn’t mean he’s not in pain.
According to the Department of Motor Vehicles, you can’t qualify for disabled
person parking plates without a doctor’s certification or, if applying in
person, the loss of a lower limb or both hands.
“These young women seemed to think all disabled people should be crawling the
streets with no assets of any kind,” Ferguson says. "Who are they to make
judgments of that kind? This is a frightening attitude. It really disturbs
me."
Hence, the confrontation.
“Harsh words were spoken,” he says. "Hand symbols were exchanged. As I was
inching back out onto Sunrise, they stood up and flipped me off, and I gave it
right back to them."
Oh, geez. That’s no way to take the high ground, though it’s a good bet
onlookers were amused.
At one point, Ferguson says, he was concerned that one of the young women was
going to attack him physically.
"I looked at her and thought, ‘If you do that, you’re going down,’ " he says.
"I didn’t want to go there. If you attack a disabled person, is that a hate
crime?"
Yes, it is, at least in California.
“What would cause a dozen young women to have become so combative?” he says.
Bad childhoods, maybe, or bad manners. Or more likely the same free-floating
anger that seems to infect people of all ages: Too many people seem ready to
explode at any moment, for any reason, at any target.
“It was like gangland,” he says. "It was bizarre and over something that was
none of their business.
"Am I crazy, or is the world losing its center?"
Crazy, no. Disabled and dissed, yes.
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