D-Blogger Day: Perspectives on Ability

I spent the day sick today, which wasn't an especially pleasant experience.  Still, it could have been a lot worse.  I was higher than I wanted to be but stayed more or less under control.

While resting, I watched two movies I've been meaning to see for a while:  Expelled and Murderball.

One minor point made in Expelled is that "civilized" humanity is distinguished by its care and concern for the weak and infirm.  That we care enough, for, say, people who don't have a working pancreas to make synthetic insulin for them to use, so they can live.  (Well, Expelled didn't mention us diabetics, specifically, but the idea certainly holds.)  It is something that affected me, because it says a lot about what kind of society we are and we want to be.

On the other side, we have the...fascinating young men of Murderball.  "Murderball" is the documentary of Quadriplegic Rugby, a cross between hockey, basketball, and rubgy played at the Olympic level as an official Paralympic game.  They called the game "Murderball" and found a hard time getting corporate sponsorships.

Murderball is a different sort of film.  Not at all your standard sports documentary.  The men of Murderball are completely unapologetic.  They're playing for a gold medal, not hugs, as one of them says during the film.  They neither ask nor give quarter while they're playing.  It's terrifying to watch, as collisions are common and brutal.  Getting knocked over is not a foul.

These men understand the risks they're taking, but they do it willingly as a way of reclaiming their lives post-injury.  Many of them were strong and athletic before the incidents that rendered them quadriplegic, and quad rugby is the way they can have as much of that back as their situations allow.

My favorite scene from Murderball is the one where Keith, a young man who had broken his neck in a motorcycle accident less than a year previous gets to see a rugby chair, demonstrated by the captain of the USA quad rugby team.  He gets to sit in it, to the obvious dismay of the hospital staff, and tap a little against the "everyday" chair the team captain also brought.  The possibility of doing, of competing, brings him a new lease on life.

I've looked online, but there's no indication whether Keith ever got to try out for the USA quad rugby team.  I hope he did, and I hope he made it.

To those who want to see Murderball:  it is surprisingly frank in parts, quite possibly too frank for many.  The profanity quotient is also pretty high.  I wouldn't recommend it for 5th graders, but it was definitely worth the watch for me.