We’ll start in the 1960’s with 60s with Ed Roberts, graduate student at University of California, Berkeley. When Roberts was young, he became sick with polio which left him paralyzed from the neck down. He went to class with the help of an attendant pushing his wheelchair and had a classmate make carbon copies of their notes. Roberts’s story was not common at the time and he soon began making headlines. Shortly after he started at Berkeley, quite a few other disabled students arrived as well. By this time, most buildings had to be built accessibly, but the streets were a different matter. Wheel to the driveway in an alley or at a loading dock; roll into the street until you reached another driveway; hope all the while that a truck didn’t pull out. Students with disabilities at Berkeley planned their class schedule according to which class was downhill from the previous one.
Being the age of activism, they initiated a campaign to change the one thing that made their movement the most difficult – curbs. In 1972 the city installed its first official “curb cut” at an intersection on Telegraph Avenue. It would become, in the words of a Berkeley advocate, “the slab of concrete heard ’round the world.”
Hundreds more curb cuts followed Berkeley’s. Then hundreds of thousands, all across the continent. Disabled advocates continued to push for access to the basics that many had taken for granted—sidewalks, classrooms, dorm rooms, washrooms, buses.
Then, as Angela Glover Blackwell in her article for the Stanford Review writes, “a magnificent and unexpected thing happened. When the wall of exclusion came down, everybody benefited—not only people in wheelchairs. Parents pushing strollers headed straight for curb cuts. So did workers pushing heavy carts, business travelers wheeling luggage, even runners and skateboarders.” Now 50 years later, we all pass through these built-in equalizers without much of a thought to how they got there.
The impact of this kind of design is so significant that the term “curb cut effect” was coined. The idea today: To make things better for one, or a few, ultimately makes things better for everyone.
Other stories are similar to Ed Roberts and the beginning of those curb cuts.
Closed Captioning was originally created so that the deaf and hard-of-hearing could watch television. But today, people watching hockey games in loud bars or watching the news while at the gym, or trying to catch their favourite episode on the bus benefit from captioning; and we have the deaf community to thank for that.
Or…what if you wanted to set out to create a vegetable peeler that was easy and comfortable to use for someone with arthritis? In developing the product, the grip was tested with people of various ages, hand sizes, hand strength and dexterity. The consideration of a functional and attractive product for all peoples led to the Good Grips being a widely-recognized design.
When we start looking all around us, we can start to recognize how solving a problem for a few can end up making life better for all.
The football huddle was initially created to help deaf football players at Gallaudet College keep their game plans secret from opponents who could have read their sign language. Today, it’s used by every team to shield the opponent from learning about game-winning strategies.
Have you ever listened to an audio book? Have you ever used a voice assistant on your phone or home speaker? Then you’re a recipient of the benefits that were developed initially to help a specific group that now help us all.
To make things better for one, or a few, ultimately makes things better for everyone.
The wisdom shared among the early christian communities couldn’t be more appropriate for the time we’re living in.
To be part of society, to be part of community means that we need each other. We all have our different functions but without the body, we’re just one function cut-off from everything else. We important, we’re crucial, we’re significant…and some of that is just because you are you and I am me. But some of that significance comes from the fact that we’re part of something bigger. Something that can work together to do things we could never do alone.
We’ve spent the better part of 2020 and 2021 trying to figure out how to be apart, but stay together. How to function on our own and yet stay connected. For some it’s worked just fine. For others, it’s been a struggle that’s taken its toll on mental health, on working conditions, on finances and on health. As a result, some would argue that we’ve learned new skills and new ways to feel connected through the web of technology and amazing new innovations. But some would also say that these are privileges of those who can afford them, those who can connect digitally. Some would argue that our isolation has made us, as a whole, more selfish – looking out more for our own wellbeing than anyone else’s, because we are shut off from those in the biggest need.
And so some act on behalf of the body and some act on behalf of their individual part. And between the two have developed not only physical, but ideological, political and uncompassionate divides.
The wisdom of this text comes to us that both the needs of the one and the needs of the many are important. It is a lovely and delicate dance between them and we all are learning the steps.
“It is this way in our lives together as community: every part dependent on every other part. If one part suffers, all suffer together with it; if one is honored, all rejoice together with it.”
So as with everything, how do we turn this wisdom into something we can do?
Here is where I find the words of poet and writer Suzy Kassem so helpful:
“To really change the world, we have to help people change the way they see things. Global betterment is a mental process, not one that requires huge sums of money or a high level of authority. Change has to be psychological. So if you want to see real change, stay persistent in educating humanity on how similar we all are than different. Don’t only strive to be the change you want to see in the world, but also help all those around you see the world through commonalities of the heart so that they would want to change with you. This is how you can change the world. The language of the heart is [humanity’s] main common language.” -Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun
We can embrace our own power as people who function together as one body. Not using power over others, not the power to get what we want at the expense of other’s wellbeing, but to be mutually powerful with each other – in the sense that we are all intertwined, we are all related, and we are all strong and capable of change, capable of influencing the world, and making a difference IF we are speaking the heart language of our common needs and desires for the world’s children, the wellbeing of all.
Hold this in your minds as you speak to people. Hold this in your hearts as you imagine with us how we can re-think our church events as we rebuild community. Hold these ways of being the body rather than individual parts of it as you think of those that hold different views than you, that we label as ignorant, or selfish or uncaring.
To make things better for one, or a few, ultimately makes things better for everyone. Thank you to the curb cuts, the captions, the crosswalk countdowns, the everyday things that remind us that signs of justice are everywhere…as inspiration for us to continue the good work of making the life of even one other, a little bit easier and little bit brighter.
-Chris New
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