The first three lines of the poem seem so normal for me. As a waitress, I have had to ask people to move often, and I would be hard pressed to say that I ever had to ask a wheelchair-using person to move; usually, it was just people with their chairs stuck way out in the aisle. Although I don’t know that I would have worded things exactly the way this waitress did, I understand the sentiment here. I have to side with the waitress, and that alienates me, as the able-bodied reader, from the poem in the very first stanza. To me, the whole idea of getting what one wants by aggravating and annoying others is wrong. Maybe it’s my upbringing, but I would prefer to get what I want by explaining and teaching, not being such a pain that people don’t have any choice but to give in. I feel guilty for this, but I don’t agree with the speaker.
The part that bothers me most, however, is the penultimate stanza, where the speaker is intent on building walls between herself and the (I assume) able-bodied who wish to deprive her of her rights. I, rather naïvely, I guess, assumed that the point of disabilities activism was to tear down walls, not create them. But in this stanza, with her language, insisting that she can “turn back/ customers, employees, delivery people, even cops” she seems to want to make others feel shamed and disgraced, and like some super-hero corrupted, flaunt her power over others ( ). I suppose in the circumstances, many people would love the feeling of power. But loving something has never made it the wisest choice, and perhaps the speaker would benefit from some distance at this point.
Hershey makes some very valid points in her writing. There are many things that should be changed, including disability rights. But I think that she also fails to realize that anyone can be in the way, not just her. I’ve been asked to move countless times by wait staff, because I have a tendency to tip my chair back and stretch out my legs. That does not, however, mean that the wait staff had something against long-legged people. Good service requires being able to move around quickly, and having people in the aisle is not conducive to that. Hershey also seems to thrill at the idea of lording herself over formerly powerful people. I don’t know if she would take it to the extreme that Hop-Frog did in the Poe story by the same name, but her idea of making a wall out of her wheelchair, separating herself in an ivory (wheelchair accessible) tower is one that could possible do more harm than good, as far as her cause is concerned.
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