“Being disabled is in the mind, if you don’t accept it, then you can do anything you want.”  That is Ghanaian wheelchair racer Raphael Botsyo Nkegbe.  If you’ve followed the Paralympics, you’ve no doubt heard similar statements. One thing for sure, it is definitely in the mind.  But whose?

Now hundreds of great sporting performances later, many pundits have announced the dawn of a new age for the disabled.  Mainstream media and public sentiment seem to have embraced the plot of sport and competition and achievement over spectacle and pity.  Could it be that we have truly turned a corner in our treatment of people who do not look like the people in magazine ads, even if none of us really look like the people in magazine ads except in so far as limb count?

Or could it be something else, such as the conspicuous, slightly uncomfortable invasion of the ranks of the disabled by strapping veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?  These are people we cannot fault for their disability (i.e., not wheelchaired in a gang shooting or drunk driving accident or stupid diving board stunt).  They grew up with us, not ghettoed by disability, not shunned from sight to the same mental closet as those with Down’s syndrome or cerebral palsy.

No, methinks we are not callous enough to place the vet in that closet.  Even opponents of war cannot escape the sense that Paralympic rower Nick Beighton, his two legs blown off by an al Queda IED, is heroic.  Is a normal guy.  Is a casualty of a democracy in which we the people have sent him to that blast.  (For the link to the aid biz, see my blog on how we market to the public a victim who is worthy of their donations, because innocent of his or her suffering.).

There is an idea in Nkegbe’s and Beighton’s and Pistorius’ determined self-definition – wresting control of one’s identity from the judgment of others – that appeals to me on an intuitive level.  Yet I struggle not to see disability.  I get it that Patrick Anderson is a wheelchair basketball scoring machine who could probably knock down 8 out of 10 from the foul line.  Translation:  he possesses a degree of hand-eye coordination that is, in comparison to my own, roughly equivalent to the relative difference (advantage mine) in our mobility.

Yet I don’t feel disabled.  And nobody perceives me as disabled.  Nor do I risk being defined or limited as a person because of what I cannot do as a result of my mediocre athletic coordination.  Ditto for speed or strength or any other physical traits – they define much about me, certainly how successful I might be in sport (or, for that matter, dance) – and yet the skills I don’t have don’t stand out as holes.  My coordination is not missing.  It’s not made of metal.  When I look at Beighton, when I think about his lost legs and what that must mean for his life, I still come to this dreadful word:  disabled.

As a subject of study, the depths of identity are far better plumbed by others.  We all get it that the world creates these categories of dysfunction or “abnormality” by making, at an almost pre-conscious level, judgments against the backdrop of a “normal”.  This normal becomes a standard, and is of course heavily weighted by our common, contemporary set of capacities. In contrast:  the synonym for people like sprinters Oscar Pistorius and Jonnie Peacock:  they are invalids.  Not valid.

Switch now from the fields of sporting endeavours to the fields of sorghum in Burkina Faso.  Switch now to poverty, to the “have nots”.  Switch to the third world, developing countries, lesser developed countries, and the global south.  What makes these labels?  What makes these countries so disabled?  Well, let’s avoid that debate and just agree that it’s something like per capita GNP.  In other words, wealth.  So who decided on that?  Who decided that societies should not be ranked according to the rate of marriage failures, or the number of unwanted teen pregnancies, or levels of drug addiction, or the percentage of old people who spend most of their life separated from family, or the number of adults who follow Rihanna on Twitter?

The real question, though, isn’t who decided the rating system by which nations are placed into the category of disabled.  The real question is this:  how do we launch the dawn of a new age in which these nations, and the billions of people in them, do not define themselves as disabled? How do we arrive at a world where huge chunks of humans do not think of HD TV or paved roads the way we think of Beighton’s missing legs?

I have no idea whatsoever.  But I have a feeling it is that very internalization of the identity of being disabled which is the true disabler.  And I have a feeling that this is the overarching challenge to development.  It slaps a giant “PART OF THE PROBLEM” sticker on the back of the aid industry. There, it is a matter of mind, a matter of definition that the Third World should see disabled when they look in the mirror.