GEEZER PARKING ONLY

Since my stroke in March of 2020, I now think of my life history in terms of two distinctly different time references -- pre-stroke and post-stroke.  In my pre-stroke life, I thought the most despicable human beings were arsonists, rapists, and swindlers.  In my opinion, those people deserved to be  a sent to the nearest penitentiary after first having their fingernails  non-surgically removed.

Now, in my new post-stroke world,  i would add  to those perfectly healthy people without handicaps or physical infirmities who park their vehicles in parking places legally reserved for handicapped persons.The worst infractors aamong this species are younger males who apparently derive some strange and shameless pleasure or satisfaction from backing their oversized pickup trucks into these spaces.  Close cousins of theirs are drivers of usually small cars driven by younger females who either have no handicap sticker or rear view mirror hanger but who nevertheless believe they have some special birthright to these spaces. I confess outright that my animosity toward these violators is relatively recent and was not prominent in my pre-stroke life.  In fact, any negative feelings I had in those days were directed  toward government initiatives and regulations mandating special privileges to the handicapped population such as those flowing from the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA).  Sometimes it seemed as if I would circle a parking lot for hours without finding a parking space when the handicapped parking spaces were unoccupied. " Why can't they -- the handicapped -- just stay at home?" I might ask rhetorically.  The ADA, I would tell myself, just drives up the cost of construction of  buildings used to serve the public, and those costs get passed onto us in the form of higher prices  for the goods and services we the public consume.  To make a long story shorter -- I didn't have enough sympathy for handicapped persons to advocate for their entitlement to special parking priviliges, much less at my expense as a taxpayer. So I was not especially offended if I saw a non-handicapped person park in a reserved- for- handicapped parking space, though I never did that myself.

 Fasting forward to my new post-stroke world, it should come as no surprise that the gg's view of this issue  has now undegone a complete reversal.

Being newly handicapped myself,  I now  have a new-found solidarity with the handicapped community,  I've learned from personal experience what a struggle it can be to get into and out of a vehicle and to ambulate into a building, be it a grocery store, restaurant, doctor's office, museum, library, concert hall, sporting arena or any other facility subject to the ADA.  And the greater the distance to be traversed, the harder the struggle to get there. So for the old gg, my new public enemy number one is the person who would make my already challenging life yet more challenging by parking in a place reserved for me and others like me.  Those people who do that make this grouchy old geezer even grouchier than usual. 

gg