Click the image to tell us what thoughts are in your head!

The module shown above is to help you use your brilliant imaginations and put you in the place of a baseline jumper who is ready to make their move from the building ledge and go down, down, down -- hopefully, with success and not injury. When we imagine this way about another person, we gain both empathy and insight to our own fears and hopes. Click on the video, too, to see them going crazy. (I know I would never have the guts to do that, what about you?)

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`This Is What Happens When People Don’t Use Their Imaginations or Ability to Make-Believe and Cause Others to be Humiliated`

It takes imagination to develop empathy and to put oneself in the shoes of another. But sometimes our imaginations are asleep on the job.

This was demonstrated recently when Chris Hinds, a Denver City Councilman, was invited to a debate and surprised the event’s organizers when they saw him arrive in a wheelchair. They were confounded by the question as to how to get someone paralyzed from the chest down up on a stage which had stairs only and no lift or ramp for the wheelchair.

As was reported in The New York Times (with video) ‘’Realizing it would be difficult to lift the 400-pound wheelchair and the 200-pound councilman onto the stage, organizers offered a suggestion, Mr. Hinds said: Could he get himself onto the stage and then they could lift the wheelchair?’’

(Now, just think about this again for a second: that’s a pretty insensitive request; can you tell me how a person paralyzed from the chest down is expected to maneuver this?)

Says The Times: with his three opponents already there, and roughly 100 attendees in their seats, Mr. Hinds began to try lifting himself with his hands onto the stage. The video shows him trying so hard to do so, trembling visibly from the exertion of trying to scoot up to the stage. (It is so painful to watch him try. I weep for him.)

“I’m thinking,’’ says Hinds. ‘‘I look like a circus monkey. I am a circus monkey. And all these folks who are here to determine who their next City Council member is — they see me just floundering.”

Finally, said Mr. Hinds, ‘’organizers eventually decided to move the candidates to the floor in front of the stage and have the debate there, where he could remain in his wheelchair.’’ (Now, that took a lot of thinking, didn’t it? Duh!)

So many questions arise: In this day and age, why didn’t event planners or the owners of the debate auditorium do a better job of anticipating such problems and plan for such situations in a public setting? Why did they subject a paralyzed man to this ordeal and humiliation? What if it had been a disabled member of their family? This just underscores the barriers that people with disabilities still face today, even three decades after Congress passed the Americans With Disabilities Act. What does it take for us to learn how to put ourselves in the position of others who live with severe disabilities – as well as those who don’t? Was it really necessary to put Mr. Hinds through that ordeal? It makes one sick to read and see this! What do you say? Please comment.

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