Not that I wasn’t sensitive to the issues before, but taking regular care of disabled people in the last few years — my dad; my mother-in-law; my wife at the end of her life — has made me much more aware of how hard it is for them to live in a world that is not designed for them.

Just think about the fact that wheelchairs are designed so they can just barely get through a standard-width door. And that a great many homes still only have showers/baths on the second floor, which creates problems when homeowners develop mobility issues for whatever reason.

The next time you open any kind of package, think for a second about how you would do it if you only had one standard-functioning hand. How would you get shrink wrapped plastic off a box? How would you get pills out of a foil-wrapped plastic sleeve?

How would you put on a pair of shoes if you only had one standard functioning hand? Especially one with shoelaces? I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m just thinking that you probably haven’t given any thought to how you would do it yourself. It’s a puzzle.

Did you know only a handful of New York subway stations even have elevators? And at most of those stations, the elevators are out of commission a lot of time? That means people in wheelchairs effectively can’t use the subway in New York. And the city does nothing to change this.

I’m not trying to add to anybody’s sadness level here, because there’s enough of that in the world. But life could be a lot less challenging/punishing/puzzling for people with disabilities if everybody else would put more thought (and funding!) into design/functionality.

I’m still angry that my father, Who has serious mobility issues from his strokes, came to visit me in New York many times and we were almost never able to use the subway because they were so few elevators and most of them were broken. It added time/expense to every outing.

I’m also becoming increasingly obsessed with how the American preference for car-biased “suburban“ city design is harder on a lot of disabled people than a denser, mandatory-accessible city layout with empathetic public transit would be.

There is a restaurant owner in town who always personally helps my mother in law up the 2 little steps leading into his restaurant. But it always makes me wonder why he can’t just get a little ramp for one of his best customers, and for mobility-impaired people generally.

I often think when I took my extended family to see a movie at Newport Mall. My dad was visiting. He & my mother-in-law were both in wheelchairs. It was an epic journey to get into the movie theater; you could tell that they weren’t taking accessibility seriously. 1/2

In order to get through certain passageways, and to get accessibility to lifts, the theater employee had to move bags and boxes of concession material. The stuff was blocking access. The facility literally gave no thought to disabled people. 2/2

It is a national scandal and should be a national shame that, decades after awareness of disability access really got on the national radar, the world is still largely indifferent to the needs of so many of its citizens. There should be endless class-action lawsuits about this.