Parolympic debate

Man… I really come from quite the family of people. We’ve got Laurie Graham, who was an Olympic skier and one of the top in the world. We’ve got Clarke Flynn, an Olympic bob sledder who’s pretty fabulous, and the latest addition is a pretty well-known Canadian astronaut named Julie Payette. Anyone who knows me knows what I think of her. That’s not important to this story. What is important is what she said to me while we were having a discussion. As most people know, the Paralympics are never broadcast and covered on national television. This has always bothered me. I feel that Paralympics athletes deserve the same credit as the Olympic ones, since they work as hard if not harder to reach that goal of making it and being the best in the world. So we were talking about this, and I told her what I thought. She responded and said that that would be just stupid to have disabled people having their own set of Olympics covered. That would be like saying that people with red hair should have their own Olympics, or people with blue eyes, or people with no mothers. She thought that having a disability was just another category of people. I thought this was a load of crap and argued that the Paralympics athletes would be at a huge disadvantage if they were to compete against the Olympic athletes because of their disabilities, whatever those might be. But she wouldn’t listen to me, and then went on to say that she believed the Paralympics were just a way for handicap people to get attention. Is it just me? Or was this a really stupid thing for someone who is supposed to be representing Canada on the 09 Space mission to have said to her blind niece?

She always makes it a point to talk about my blindness. She wants me to find out a way to open my eyes all the time. This time it was that I should go see a phisio therapist and they could help me learn to open them. One other time I should have gotten an operation as a child. Like seriously, what the fuck is the problem with my eyes being closed? What is having them opened going to prove? Someone help me out here.