The Oscar Pistorius case can’t be allowed to destroy Paralympic legacy
You are no
longer allowed to sneer on grounds of race. But it is open season for
bigots to openly despise and joke about the disabled again
John Cleese said: “Oscar’s defence will be that he was absolutely legless at the time.”
Joan Rivers said: “He doesn’t have a leg to stand on.”
Frankie Boyle said: “Oscar Pistorius’s girlfriend must have known he was armed as those are the only limbs he’s got.”
Laugh? I thought I’d never start.
But then this rubbish is not really about making you smile – no more than jokes about the thick Irish and comical black men called Chalky were meant to make you laugh back in the Seventies.
It is meant to make you feel superior. It gives you permission to sneer at a group of people different from yourself.
You are no longer allowed to sneer on grounds of race. But it is open season on the disabled.
You might think we would be beyond this kind of garbage by now.
You might hope that even a bunch of clapped-out comedians desperate to revive their sagging careers would refrain from this kind of trash.
You might even think that the lessons of the most glorious Paralympics in history could possibly have sunk into the thickest of heads.
For those Paralympics truly did feel like they signalled a shift in public consciousness.
As though we had finally been made aware of what a disabled man or woman can achieve, given half a chance.
Human beings don’t have to wallow in the small-minded, mean-spirited attitudes of their ancestors.
Sometimes the cycle of fear and loathing can be broken.
I grew up with Muhammad Ali on the TV screen. I saw with my own eyes how one man changed hearts and minds.
I grew up in a white working-class community – a world where racial prejudice was endemic and virulent.
And one boxer changed that. He did not change it for everyone, and he did not eliminate prejudice, and he did not make this wicked world perfect.
But he sure as hell made it a lot better.
Oscar Pistorius – and all the other Paralympians that graced last summer – did exactly the same.
Those games did not win the battles that the disabled face every day of their lives.
But they helped the rest of us understand those battles better than we did before.
We looked at the disabled with different eyes – their struggles, their humanity, their diversity, their potential.
But that real progress is receding now. It is not just a few past-their-sell-by-date comedians on Twitter.
A shooting in South Africa has claimed more than the young life of Reeva Steenkamp.
The buzzword for London 2012 was legacy – the measure of what would remain after the athletes had gone home and the party was over.
The legacy of 2012 was most commonly defined as the facilities that would endure, and the use that local communities would put them to.
But there was always a far greater legacy – the legacy of dreams inspired in the watching billions across the world.
The Olympics lit a fire in countless hearts. And the Paralympics were even more inspirational.
Nobody embodied the soaring human spirit of the Paralympics like Oscar Pistorius. Nobody changed attitudes like the Blade Runner.
And even when he was showing flashes of his dark side, snarling and ungracious in defeat, somehow that did not tarnish the golden boy.
Because it just showed how much he wanted to win and it made the Paralympics seem not like some patronising sideshow but hard, competitive, gripping sport of the highest order.
The court will decide if Oscar Pistorius killed his girlfriend by accident or premeditated murder.
But we know in our hearts that the Paralympics made this world a better place.
Our collective attitude to disability changed because of those games.
Because of one summer we were more enlightened, more tolerant, more human.
As the village idiots on Twitter prove, those gains are now being lost.
It is socially acceptable to despise the disabled again. Culled from Mirror News.
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Oscar Pistorius shooting: Picture timeline
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