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“When does a physical difference count, under what conditions, and in what ways, and for what reasons?” I immediately thought of the case that Anne showed us where the girl in India was born with extra limbs and organs, but the fact that she looked like a Hindu goddess made the village where she was born worship her. To them she was not “disabled” at all—in fact, she was especially abled and gifted. This also relates to the first story of Nunez; to him these blind people were disabled and he thought he would have a clear advantage by living in their village, when in fact he became the disabled one. This article, and this story in particular, made me think a lot about the idea of a population and of the terms ‘majority’ and ‘minority.’ In the Country of the Blind, the blind people were majority of the population so it was not seen as a disability. Are people who fall under a minority category automatically disabled, whether that’s being blind, crippled, or even African American?

Then I started thinking about non-physical disabilities? What if today, being gay were considered a disability? Maybe it is! If so, has the LGBT community formed a culture that others would feel and appear disabled in? I was asking Meredith the other day what would happen if a heterosexual couple walked into the lesbian bar that she spoke of in her paper. Would they be accepted? Would they be “the odd ball” in the bunch? Even then, she talked about how even within the LGBT community there is discrimination and segregation. “In every society, there are ways of being locked out. Race gender, or beauty can serve as the dividing point as easily as being sighted or blind.”