…The homonymic patient/patient, is, I think, not coincidental or irrelevant. The noun patient is a role designation that is always relational. A patient is understood to belong to a doctor or other health care professional, or more generally to an institution. As a noun, patient is a neutral description of the role of "one who receives medical attention, care, or treatment" (American Heritage Dictionary 1992). The adjective patient moves beyond the noun's neutral designation to describe a person who is capable of "bearing or enduring pain, difficulty, provocation, or annoyance with calmness" as well as "tolerant ... persevering ... constant …. not hasty" (American Heritage Dictionary 1992). The "good" patient is one who does not challenge the authority of the practitioner or institution and who complies with the regimen set out by the expert, in other words a patient. Disabled people, who have often spent a great deal of time as patients, discuss the ways that we have been socialized in the medical culture to be compliant, and that has often undermined our ability to challenge authority or to function autonomously. Further, the description of disabled people as patients in situations where we are not, reinforces these ideas.

Linton, Simi. My Body Politic: A Memoir. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2006. 242. Print.

A problem I see with the "Wounded Warrior" concept is that it creates yet another stratification for the "deserving disabled." The wounded warrior is essentially a subclass of an already protected class, subject to all the protections afforded the parent class (the disabled). This may seem a semantic point to raise, but statutorily and socially, it is very meaningful.

To create laws affecting change and protections for, specifically, wounded warriors, leaves out the rest of the disabled people. When we effectively remove wounded warriors from the pool of people with disabilities, this divides them from others with disabilities, and enforces that protections afforded wounded warriors are due to their service and not as protections that should be afforded anyone with a disability.

Eventually, as Linton points out, the fervor around the wounded warrior movement will fade; but the laws created around this social fiction, and the damage done to those left on the other side of this fabricated divide, will remain. These wounded warriors of today will be like every other disabled person twenty, thirty years from now. But they will not likely have the PR campaigns and awareness marketing that afford them the modest services they receive.

Linton, Simi. My Body Politic: A Memoir. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2006. 183. Print.

I might change the language to 'without making demands on privilege', but this passage portrays the issue of passing, and the complacency of privilege, very well. Linton continues saying:

We "passers" fool the public into thinking disability is an individual thing, a matter of personal fortitude and courage. It fuels the myth of "overcoming," and it compromises others' rights. (Linton 183)

Further, while discussing how a motorized wheelchair had some benefits, she dismantles the public reliance on donations and research and cures and technology to defer systemic improvements:

It is not simply new technologies that will improve people's lives. For instance, before the ADA went into effect there were rarely curb cuts on city streets... The curb cut requires no advanced technology; it probably could have existed from the minute curbs were invented... Without them though [my motorized wheelchair] would be just a hunk of metal, all charged up with nowhere to go. [It] didn't liberate me, any more than the birth control pill or the washing machine liberated women. These are useful tools, but the tools only work for us when broader, more systemic change occurs.

In my case, as an epileptic, I am not liberated by anti-epilepsy drugs; since I can never plan to be seizure free, and know another seizure is always lurking, its important to state that all the medicine and research in the world can improve the quality of my life, but it does not make me independent. "Awareness" should be dedicated to forging relationships that make my dependencies diffuse so they cannot be leveraged against me.

Re: getting taken out of your wheel chair, and carried, and social perception that it sends a message that you are just like everyone else.

Linton, Simi. My Body Politic: A Memoir. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2006. 99. Print.

She goes on to speak of her sister's book, No Apologies: Making it with a Disability, a book where her sister "interviewed disabled people and compiled that material into a beautful book filled with pictures and words of people often not seen or heard from (Linton 99)."

This passage really holds for me one of the secrets behind the marginalization of people with disabilities; our society hides them away from itself. Society, like some third grade kid who just met someone who's different, insulates itself and secrets away the people with differences, and pats itself on the back for 'awareness' of an illness, a concept which centers itself on the person who is aware and not the person with the disability.

Having epilepsy - an invisible disability when it isn't debilitating - I am not visible to society generally as a person with a disability (PWD). Nonetheless, November is Epilepsy Awareness Month; the drive for awareness among the nondisabled makes me ask the following questions:

How can society be aware of what it means to be living with a disability, when PWDs are taught from the start that they should shape their objectives around what nondisabled people value?

Does awareness actually inform society of what PWD value, or reduce PWDs to a list of symptoms and a couple token inspirational people?