Why Colin Brewer is Wrong

I do not usually take part in blog link ups.  It’s not that I have anything against them, I don’t.  It’s just I’m not a very  “bloggy” person.  Now this seems ridiculous as I ran a blog alongside Little Doers before costs (the cost to me) made me take the painful decision to close and I have now set up this site.  However it’s true, I’m just a bit unsocial I guess.

The reason why I decided to take part in Down Side Up’s linky is this.

Today I saw a tweet from Hayley with the hashtag #brewerout and I then went and read her article (find it here).  As a disabled parent (I have a chronic illness which has placed me in a wheelchair) of an autistic son and a daughter who would have died without medical intervention in the first weeks of life (she is ok now apart from allergies) I am disgusted and appalled by this miscreant’s use of the media to divulge his revolting views to anyone who will listen and like Hayley I also have kept quiet as I did not want to fan the flames of his evident attention seeking.

However.

Things have to be said.

In his latest diatribe, Mr Brewer has likened disabled children to lambs who should be, for want of a better word, culled at birth or on discovering of their lameness.  To borrow from Huffington Post’s extraction of the Disability News Service’s interview Mr Brewer commented:

                            “If they have a misshapen lamb, they get rid of it. They get rid of it.

                             Bang!”

                            He continued: “We are just animals. He [the farmer] obviously has

                            got a point… You can’t have lambs running around with five legs and

                            two heads.”

                           Brewer said: “It [the lamb] would be put down, smashed against the

                           wall and be dealt with.”

Now as a disabled parent of a child with a disability I find it difficult not to cry at his remarks.  I come from a family where disability is rife, my parents are both disabled, as is my sister and my Aunt died in 2010 after a lifetime spent fighting the legacy of the polio that nearly killed her as a child (she was not just affected in a limb like Jeremy Beadle, her entire body was affected, she spent a lot of her life in hospital and it caused many other illnesses and weakness during her lifetime).

Despite the disability rife in my family none of these people are malingerers or lame.  My father continued to work long after his Drs told him to take early retirement; my mother still works; my sister is a writer and artist and I have set up businesses, developed my art and photography work, completed an MA and am now in the process of setting up a charity and home educating my amazing disabled son.  My aunt learnt to live alone, went away to college and worked the majority of her life when she could have not.

We are not the exception to the rule.

There are thousands of brave, heroic and hard working disabled people who put in so much more than they take out of the collective pot, whether that be financially or in what they give to others.

In the same way that if you teach a man to fish he will feed his family for a lifetime; if you save a child with a disability they may just save the world (one day).