Polite Dissent

14 Responses to “ Tuesday PSA: The Invisible Handicap! ”

1. Eric TF Bat
   September 23rd, 2009 at 1:24 am
   

   Scene: a classroom. Students working on art projects. LITTLE ROBBIE shows his drawing to another student, LITTLE GARY.

   L. GARY: Haw haw! Look at Robbie’s picture! He can’t even draw feet!

   LITTLE ROBBIE runs from the room, crying.

   TEACHER: You’re right, children. Little Robbie DOES have a problem. See these faces, all scowling identically? See these over-muscled bodies? Shee this picture of Captain America with the enormous boobies?

   CHILDREN: Yes! He’s pretty crap, eh Teach?

   TEACHER: Indeed! Robbie suffers from a problem called Not Being Terribly Good At Drawing. It’s a rare and debilitating disease, and one for which there is NO CURE.

   LITTLE GARY: So what should we do, Miss?

   TEACHER: Carry on as you have been. Ridicule him, and make him feel like an idiot. With luck, he may stop drawing altogether! Then we’ll all be happy!

   CHILDREN: Yay!

   TEACHER: Oh, and Gary?

   LITTLE GARY: Yes, Miss?

   TEACHER: I wouldn’t be too quick to judge, if I were you. At least Robbie knows how to draw eyeballs, for goodness’ sake…

2. Dean
   September 23rd, 2009 at 1:44 am
   

   Years later, Tod becomes a successful abstract artist. That yellow stick-figure sells at auction for $3.2 million.

3. Charlene
   September 23rd, 2009 at 5:47 am
   

   Unfortunately, “it’s none of their business” wasn’t a popular belief among teachers, ministers, or really anyone in the 50s when it came to people with disabilities. If you were disabled you were public fodder and had no privacy: your purpose in life was to make other people feel good about themselves, either by being pitiful, inspiring (as above), or easy to proselytize.

4. Alberto
   September 23rd, 2009 at 7:01 am
   

   First panel: Tod looks like he is smack his critics real hard.

   Fourth panel: teacher looks at me with really, really scary eyes.

   Sixth panel: boy’s grin scares the bejeesus out of me. It looks like he is being mind controlled (and all the other kids as well) .

   One of the scariest PSAs I’ve ever seen.

5. Stephen
   September 23rd, 2009 at 7:04 am
   

   The fourth panel…..
   SHE WANTS MY SOUL!

6. Keith
   September 23rd, 2009 at 7:04 am
   

   Kids sure must have changed a lot since I was in grade-school. My peers would have made Tod’s life a living hell.

7. Devon
   September 23rd, 2009 at 7:09 am
   

   You don’t have to have brain damage to get upset when someone calls your drawing ‘dopey’. You don’t even need brain damage to be a crappy artist! I say that kid gets detention for being a jerk instead of that poor explanation.

8. Metz77
   September 23rd, 2009 at 9:19 am
   

   The last panel is so incredibly patronizing it’s painful.

9. Alberto
   September 23rd, 2009 at 12:52 pm
   

   Oops, I was so scared I didn’t notice my bad writing.

   “Tod looks like he is smack his critics real hard.” – I meant “Tod looks like he could smack his critics real hard.”

10. Jon
    September 23rd, 2009 at 3:12 pm
    

    And the teacher has a weird-shaped head. Maybe this is a Night Gallery episode, where all the kids and the teacher are actually retarded people in a brilliant world — but ONLY TOD KNOWS IT…

11. Marionette
    September 24th, 2009 at 3:21 am
    

    I don’t get it. Are we supposed to believe that Tod’s invisible brain damage has got better by the last panel?

    What is even actually wrong with him? The explanation is so vague that I have no idea what his actual problem is.

12. Omega
    September 24th, 2009 at 5:13 am
    

    “There’s no reason the teacher needs to share with them precisely what’s wrong with Tod”

    I disagree with this. My sons classmates were a lot more understanding with him after the teacher explained about autism and why having it made him behave the way he did sometimes.
    He still had to leave mainstream schooling and move to a specialist school when it became obvious that he just wasn’t going to be able to do his best without more experienced and directed support but it did mean he left with friends instead of being just the weirdo outsider.

13. Sean Duggan
    September 25th, 2009 at 8:02 am
    

    You know, it strikes me that it’s less likely that Tod’s actually suffering from “brain damage” and more likely that he simply has a learning disability. Again, not something the students are likely to understand and frankly, not something the teachers are likely to understand. And, unlike brain damage, there’s a high chance of Tod “getting it” and improving because someone found another way to explain the drawing process to him.

    This dovetails nicely in to the fact that learning disabilities are indeed often termed “the invisible handicap” because for a long time, it was hard to get a school to classify it as a handicap and therefore something to be treated.

14. Xezlec
    September 29th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
    

    Jon:

    Night Gallery? Wow. I kind of like that you went there instead of Twilight Zone.

Leave a Reply