Complaint box: Whatever happened to tact?
June 8th, 2010Poet Jennifer Bartlett writes in the New York Times City Room blog about her experiences with rude people who feel free to comment on her disability. Bartlett has cerebral palsy. An excerpt:
Bus riders have referred to me as mentally backward (while I was reading James Joyce), and waitresses routinely ask my companion what I want to order. In a club, once, an older man asked me to dance. Upon hearing my voice, he commented to his friend, “She’s some kind of retard,” and walked off.
… The problem isn’t exactly that people have these reactions. The problem is that they have no tact. It’s as though they have some kind of disconnect and think I don’t hear, or can’t process, their comments. Sometimes I feel like screaming: “Hello! There’s a human being in here. And she’s registering your stupidity.”
Bartlett’s first collection of poetry is “Derivative of the Moving Image,” University of New Mexico Press.
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