Seeing the story in the stranger

Jule Koch Brison | Mar 31, 2011

Photo: Norman Kunc

“Why is it fun to be mean?”

“How do we create a sense of belonging without relying on a common enemy?”

With these and other questions, along with stories laced with humour and wit, Norman Kunc challenged a large audience of students and staff at Sharbot Lake High School last week to re-examine their views of disabilities and people with disabilities, their views of the world and of themselves.

Norman Kunc has a Master of Science degree in Family Therapy and is co-director of a company, Broadreach Training and Resources in Nanaimo, B.C., whose aim is to “help individuals with disabilities and their families live rich and meaningful lives in their communities”.

Kunc has cerebral palsy (CP) and addressed the students on March 24 from his wheelchair. “You don’t need to feel sorry for me,” he said. “If someone offered me a cure I’d turn it down. Why? I’ve always had CP – our identity is a product of our history - and I would have to start my history all over again. It would be like what you would have to do if you theoretically had a sex change operation.”

Norman stressed to the audience that he didn’t want people to be nice to him, didn’t want people to try to be “best buddies”. He said that what people with disabilities want is to be “authentically included”, and told a story to illustrate what that means.

He said that when he was a child, even though he lived close to a baseball field, it was a place he never went to. At that time he could still walk and wasn’t confined to a wheelchair, but he thought that in order to play baseball you had to be able to run. Many years later when he was at university, he went out with some friends one day, and afterwards they all decided to play baseball. They invited him to come along, but he thought, “No way – how could I play?”

But they figured it out, he told the audience. With some experimentation, they figured out that it took him 12 seconds longer than the others to run from home plate to first. So when he started to run, they gave him 12 counts before throwing him out. They had to invent a few other rules, he said, “but once those rules were in place, it was fun for everyone because it was fair – they gave me 12 seconds, not 14 seconds; no one ‘let’ me be safe.”

He encouraged the audience to be innovative and creative in finding ways of authentically including people with disabilities in their activities and their lives.

Norman Kunc also challenged the audience to view disability and people with disabilities as “normal”. He said that in every culture and every age, there have always been disabled people.

“We aren’t ‘broken’; we’re a normal part of the diversity in a society,” he said, adding that it took a long time for him to realize he was under no obligation to anyone to not to be disabled.

“When you think about disability, what do you see?” he asked the students, showing a slide of an empty wheelchair. He said, “You see only the limitations, but did you ever think that a wheelchair could be graceful? Fun? Even sexy?” He then switched slides to show people in wheelchairs dancing with very glamorously dressed non-wheelchair bound partners; playing fast-moving basketball; and careening up and down skateboard ramps, sometimes wiping out in the process.

He told the students that all of us, on a deep level, feel the need to belong, and said that it’s not that hard to create a sense of belonging without being addicted to a common enemy; that the students can do just a few simple things that would have a huge impact.

One is to value our diversity, and another is to realize that we’re all like a half full glass of water– there are things we do well and things we can’t do well. “But that’s ok because in that way everything’s covered,” he said. “Figure out what you do well and really do it well, and then the others will do what they can do well.”

Kunc also encouraged the students to “see the story in the stranger”, to not make split-second judgments, but to find out the ways in which other people’s life stories are similar to theirs and to ask themselves what they can learn from the person. “Never assume there’s nothing we can learn,” he said.

At the end of his talk, Norman Kunc received a standing ovation from the audience.

Several articles on the topics he addressed at the high school as well as videos are posted on Norman Kunc’s website: www.normemma.com