Alienation
Alienation
Alienation. To alienate a person is to separate him; to make him feel alone. For as long as humans have existed there has always been one form of alienation or another. All it takes is one miniscule difference, and an individual can immediately become targeted and harassed; for years people with mental disabilities have dealt with this.
Name-calling is a very prominent form of alienation by making a person’s differences his or her identifier. During the 80’s and 90’s the word ‘retarded’ was used as a way to describe people with mental disabilities. Originally it was a medical and professional term not meant to be derogatory in any way, but in the mid 2000’s and early 2010’s it rapidly became a term of insult. Consequently, it is used as though it is a word synonymous to adjectives such as unintelligent, annoying, or strange. To call someone out of their name is to take away their identity, and to replace someone’s name with something negative is to cast them as something negative. Along with “retard” or “retarded” other words have come along like: “Sped", a conjunction of the words special and ed as in special education. Our society has been taught to look the other way without thinking about how we would feel or react if we were alone and in said situation. This makes it even harder for people living with mental disabilities to live in our world comfortably.
In our culture of the strong and thriving, with our natural selection mentality as a nation, we have adjusted to the thought that only the mentally and physically prevailing may be fully accepted. Anything different must be looked down upon, alienated, and/or overlooked. The mentally handicapped are made to feel bad for being the way that they are; for being the way that they were born. I remember being in elementary school with a girl who was mentally disabled. Everyone mocked her, ignored her when she spoke, and excluded her from any group fun that was being had. In essence she was looked
Alienation. To alienate a person is to separate him; to make him feel alone. For as long as humans have existed there has always been one form of alienation or another. All it takes is one miniscule difference, and an individual can immediately become targeted and harassed; for years people with mental disabilities have dealt with this.
Name-calling is a very prominent form of alienation by making a person’s differences his or her identifier. During the 80’s and 90’s the word ‘retarded’ was used as a way to describe people with mental disabilities. Originally it was a medical and professional term not meant to be derogatory in any way, but in the mid 2000’s and early 2010’s it rapidly became a term of insult. Consequently, it is used as though it is a word synonymous to adjectives such as unintelligent, annoying, or strange. To call someone out of their name is to take away their identity, and to replace someone’s name with something negative is to cast them as something negative. Along with “retard” or “retarded” other words have come along like: “Sped", a conjunction of the words special and ed as in special education. Our society has been taught to look the other way without thinking about how we would feel or react if we were alone and in said situation. This makes it even harder for people living with mental disabilities to live in our world comfortably.
In our culture of the strong and thriving, with our natural selection mentality as a nation, we have adjusted to the thought that only the mentally and physically prevailing may be fully accepted. Anything different must be looked down upon, alienated, and/or overlooked. The mentally handicapped are made to feel bad for being the way that they are; for being the way that they were born. I remember being in elementary school with a girl who was mentally disabled. Everyone mocked her, ignored her when she spoke, and excluded her from any group fun that was being had. In essence she was looked