The Baby and the Burden

Photo decription: A picture of a child after amputations carried out on his arms and legs, wording on the picture says: if u ignore u r heartless type amen if he is cute.

This is the first thing I saw this morning when I went on my Facebook page. I'm not sure what motivates this kind of post, I'm not sure what it's supposed to do, I am sure that the only benefit from typing 'amen' comes to the typist not the child in the picture. I'm quite sure that this little kid doesn't care two whits if you think he's cute. I wonder what he'll think of the picture when he gets older - I wonder if he'll wonder about who gave consent for his photo to be used in this way. Or was consent given at all ... was the picture, perhaps, taken by loving parents and then taken from them by someone who saw a poster instead of a child.

But people get to type 'amen' and feel good about themselves because they just proved they aren't heartless. Momentary warm fuzzy and move along to other business, humanity ensured.

I didn't comment.

I didn't know how to put my feelings into words.

So I come here, to write this, and hope that somehow I'll be able to do so.

And I find I can't.

That this little fellow has to pick up the burden of 'inspiration' so young. That he has to begin his life in the way he will have to live it, dealing with the immature emotional needs of those who chose to see him as being made for their benefit and be defined by their need for meaning, rather than to determine and strive to live a life that benefits him and his needs, that finds his own meaning in his own life, seems tragic to me. There will be those who say that he will be a burden. There are those of us that know he, instead, is the burden bearer.

Once again, I say, we need to get our stories out and our voices heard. When I look at this kid, I see a future that includes, school, graduation, love, marriage, children, work. Maybe it's best said that when I look at this child I see, without question, a life full of everything that everyone experiences. Cute or not.

I think that children like this little boy are in real and present danger. This photo doesn't prove that people have heart, it proves that they don't! It proves that they can look at a living human child presented as an object, a thing, without protest. Believe me there were no protests about the picture in the comments, just a meaningless list of 'amens.' He is in real and present danger because as was pointed out by Diane Coleman from Not Dead Yet "Under the Canadian Supreme Court ruling, disabled people explicitly qualify for assisted suicide whether or not they are 'terminal'". 

Other status, or as some put it, the status of being other, is deadly.

I want to do something, change something, make the world better for this little boy. Beginning with this picture, but I don't know what to do.

Help.