The BBC News article"We’re adults, not children, says learning disabled girl band " reports that the gril group whose members all have learning difficluties wants the world to see them as an artist above all. Through their performance, they want to prove everyone that they are capable of a lot more than people think.
I have just finished watching one Korean drama called " Good Doctor" This drama taught me a lot of things and made me think about human potential. It is the story about a young man with a developmental disability who struggles to become a good doctor. Even though he has an exceptional memory and keen spatial skills, his colleagues or patients' parents look down on him because he has the mentality of a ten-year-old boy. They believed that he was not suitable to become a doctor and tried to ged rid of him. Two people, his boss and senior, supported him and encouraged him to keep fighting and never give up. He made a lot of efforts and was able to overcome his disablity, and in the end, he succeeded in becoming a certified doctor. This is a ficiton story, but similar things happens in the real world. All the members in the girl band group always felt they were treated as disabled people rather than just people. School teachers kept telling them that they could not learn anything and treated them as a child even they reached to the age of 18. Their parents always believed their potential and there was one more person who was confident enough to invite them to form a group. The name of the band is"The Sisters of Invention" and those girls want to make a revolution to change pople's view of disabled people.
I used to have some kind of prejudice towards disabled people just because they were different from me. We are all different in the first place. Everyone has a potencial. No one has the right to say one is better than the other. In the last episode of the drama, the young man asked his boss about the definition of a good doctor. He replied that a person who keeps pursuing this question is a good doctor. As a human, I think I am resposible to keep asking myself to become a better person. What do you think?
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When I read Tomomi's idea that "No one has the right to say one is better than the other" (para. 4) it seemed to me to express the basic principle underlying democracy - a principle denied when one group in a country say, for example, that another group should not have an equal voice in determining the form of government and society because they are less educated or the like. Such comments seem to me deeply anti-democratic, and morally bad.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if this is what was in Tomomi's mind, but it came into my mind when I read her response.
I also know the Korean drama which was very faomus. In the drama, the doctor has asperger's syndrome. If the charachter has a simple autism, the story could not be made. In the real world, there are more people who have simple autism than the special syndrome.
ReplyDeleteI did wonder when I read Tomomi's report that he had been able to become a doctor despite having "a developmental disability." If it's Asperger's Syndrome, that sounds more reasonable.
DeleteAnother thought, perhaps related to one of your essay questions (here), is that I'm not sure how far I agree that we all have a potential: human beings do differ in ability and almost every other way, and I think some might differ in ways serious enough to prevent their actually being persons. If that were so, would they then have no more entitlement to "human rights" than does the chimpanzee, Tommy, who was this week denied any such protection by the US Court?
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