«Burioni with disabilities»: when disability becomes an offense

I don’t know Andrea Tosatto personally, I don’t follow him on social media, and this is not a personal attack on him. I don’t even understand what he does in life, even though he calls himself a “clinical psychologist” in one of his tweets. But this is not the point. The point is that I would like to make a hearing that starts from Tosatto to deal with a generic problem that goes beyond his person: the usual bad habits of those who use disability as a form of insult, as a comparison to denigrate, discriminating those who every day have to fight for the achievement of a substantial parity that also, or above all, passes through language, this being a fundamental piece in the construction of culture and common sense.

In the screenshot above, in fact, we can see the psychologist using the term “handicapped” (among other things, technically wrong and discriminatory in itself, so much so that the WHO has also removed it from its official documents, as it refers to a medicalized, constricting and heavy vision of disability) to offend the well-known virologist Roberto Burioni on Facebook. In fact, Tosatto argues that we should be understanding with the doctor, exactly as one would do with a person with obvious cognitive problems (this too, generalization, as if all disabled people were mentally and not only physically disabled). A form of attack well rooted in our culture, unfortunately, and which indirectly does nothing but detract from an entire category of people who have nothing to do, at least by definition, with that “stupidity” which was then the real center of the discourse ( right or wrong).

In conclusion, being disabled does not mean not understanding anything, or at least not by condition. Even if claiming this possibility is always good, because remember that a disabled person is first of all a person and as such can be intelligent or ignorant, good or bad, funny or unpleasant, polite or boorish. But, in fact, not regardless. Not because “disabled”. While the Italian language offers us a lot of alternatives that can be exploited as synonyms of stupid: stupid, stupid, obtuse, imbecile, stupid, dumb, fool, and we could continue to the more creative mammalucco, broccoli, stupid, my horse of “head to pine nut” battle … Without bothering those who live in situations of difficulty of a completely different kind, certainly unwanted, as is often the most profound ignorance, that of those who do not want to understand and involve third parties, perhaps in unconscious way, but with dangerous lightness.

Only in this way can we hope to to see substantial parity recognized for people with disabilities, and not yet another belittling treatment where the validity of the person and his intellectual gifts are questioned.

Again, the simplest things prove to be the best: in order not to make a mistake, just be dry and direct, without funny turns and somersaults, without silly comradeship jokes.