Ghost

One thing I see a lot is people suggesting canes as a catch-all mobility aid for everyone who has mobility issues. Canes are not for weight bearing! If you use a cane for heavy weight bearing long term, you will hurt your wrists and back! Canes are for balance. There are also different types of canes, but someone else can probably explain those better than I can.

A crutch/pair of crutches is better for bearing weight, particularly forearm/support crutches if you're going to be using them a lot and don't want to strain your wrists, or platform crutches if you don't have a lot of arm strength.

Walkers/rollators are good for if you do have arm and hand strength and need a place to sit down or need to carry a lot with you, but very very bad if you can't weight bear well with your arms or pull the brakes easily. You will often need to be able to use your foot to maneuver it over a slight lip, too. If you can't do all of those things you will hurt yourself.

Wheelchairs are a whole lot more complicated and I don't feel qualified to speak on that (I've only ever used improperly fitted chairs, and have suffered permanent damage because of it).

Mobility scooters are great for going outside alone if you don't have the arm strength for a manual chair, as they can handle terrain that an motorised wheelchair often can't, but are harder to maneuver in small spaces (especially bulky class 3 scooters, which aren't designed for indoor use at all) and usually aren't suitable for full time use. If you need more support they most likely won't be suitable either, the seats are usually not designed with support for people who cannot hold themselves upright and generally do not have a seatbelt by default. I'm working on a proper guide for this and will hopefully post it soon!

There's also deconditioning to keep in mind, which is very important to think about if you aren't doing physiotherapy. You also need to consider things like pressure sores, which you will be especially prone to in seated mobility aids if you aren't able to reposition yourself regularly or have loss of sensation in or awareness of any part of your body.

As an example, I use forearm crutches but in a monster walk looking gait because thats more appropriate for balance issues, not for if you need to support one leg

(yes this entirely for corporate profit)

Cut and paste the docket number to put in your response if you remember. You can comment anonymously if you want.

The Oregon Zoo has some sample arguments you can make.

The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things. We did ask that white People stop doing certain things because they weren’t doing them respectfully and were not invited to do them, but the primary reason we asked them to desist was to reclaim the things they had stolen and to reassign them culturally back where they belonged.

White “allies” saw these conversations happening and instead of trying to aplify our own voices or even try to learn about the complexities behind why we were saying what we were saying, they instead began screaming over us and creating a narrative that was hardly even the bones of what we originally set out to say. It was like they took the conversation we were trying to have, completely decontextualized it, and stripped it of all it’s nuance in order to gain social currency by seeming progressive.

So the conversation around cultural appropriation went from “This aspect of our heritage belongs to us and we find it egregious that we are shamed for it. What steps can we take to address the racism that’s creating this situation as well as rehome the things that have been stolen” to “you’re not allowed to do that because if you do that you’re racist, we don’t really understand why that’s racist but you’re not allowed to do that and if you do that you’re a klansman no exceptions. So you’re not allowed because because”

At the end of the day, did I like the fact that sally was wearing dreads? No. But my primary concern was not that sally was wearing dreads but rather that sally could wear dreads and I couldn’t. THAT was the intended focus of those conversations. It was about addressing the inequality. It was about us. Now the conversation is just about sally and were completely forgotten.