Whose Public Space Is It, Anyway?

Recently my son and husband and I went to a local diner for dinner. At the table next to us, a toddler was crying. And crying. And crying. The parents made a number of attempts to calm him, and the waitress spoke cheerfully, but he squalled more or less nonstop during our entire time there.

And you know what? We lived.

We ate our meal. We enjoyed it. We had a pleasant conversation. The noise was mildly irritating, but probably far less so than it would have been if we'd let ourselves get worked up about it. Or, I suppose, if we'd never been there, done that.

Maybe having a child with special needs gives you special understanding for those in difficult circumstances. I hope it does. I hope it gives us an extra measure of compassion, so we don't turn into the kind of people who would drive an autistic kid out of a favorite restaurant, as this post on the blog Don't Bite the Dog describes.

The little girl in question had her routine disrupted when the restaurant her family always goes to on vacation didn't have the pizza she always orders. A meltdown followed, and as her parents were going through their own routine for getting her out of it, the restaurant's greeter asked them to skedaddle. Seems the patrons of another table had threatened to leave without paying if that noisy kid wasn't made to shut-up or leave.

When told the child had autism, the greeter allegedly said, "If she is autistic and this is how she acts, you shouldn’t take her out in public."

The mom appears to have done what I would have in that situation: Got out of there first, stewed about it later, and started writing letters. I don't how many parents picked up the call to add their voices in protest to Smitty's restaurants, but according to the blog Parent Dish, the family already has an apology from the president of the chain, along with a pledge to raise staff awareness and contribute to autism research.

That's nice. But it's not going to help unless they raise patron awareness, is it? And community awareness. And the level of compassion, or at least tolerance, humans are prepared to show to one another. I mean, what kind of people threaten not to pay their bill if another restaurant patron can't be made to stop displeasing them? What kind of restaurant employee would rather have deadbeat customers than ones with developmental disabilities?

I'd like to think this was an isolated incident, but of course, it's not. And it's not limited to behavior. I remember a school parents' meeting a couple of months ago where the discussion turned to the potential banning of peanuts on airplanes. The consensus seemed to be that if you're so allergic to peanuts that you can't be in a plane with them, you should just stay home and never travel.

Is that the way it's going to be? Really? Does having a disability not entitle you to a full measure of public participation? I get that there's a trade-off of rights involved sometimes, but there has to be some appreciation of the difference in weight -- is the right to eat peanuts really equivalent to the right to travel freely? the right to a peaceful dining experience really equivalent to the right to leave the house? Public spaces belong to all of us, and a little perspective wouldn't hurt. Yet the message I'm hearing for disabled people and their families is, You can be here as long as you don't bother anybody. Like we're all on some sort of probation, and our rights can be revoked at will -- if our kid makes a commotion, say, or somebody needs that handicapped parking space.

We've been thinking it's just a matter of ignorance, that if people really understood what was going on and what was at stake, they'd show understanding and compassion. That's the way it was supposed to be. But I'm starting to get the feeling there's a backlash coming. And the answer to, "My child has a disability" is going to be, "He shouldn't be out in public." And then we're right back to Square One, aren't we?

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