THE HUMAN RIGHT TO EXIST

Words can represent windows or walls. Words are the most powerful weapon each of us has. We are all equipped with this weapon, always loaded, and without a safety catch, always ready to fire. A weapon that can hurt, mortally or only superficially, but if used in the most appropriate way, could help, soothe pain, scratch doubts and insecurities. A weapon that should never be aimed at another’s heart.

Words can create distance or help to understand each other. The same words used in different contexts can be appropriate, confusing or even offensive, but if we use the right ones they could become the foundation of the inclusive world we all live in together.

The social identity of the person with disability in the course of human history has been the subject of alternating destinies, which have often materialized in denigrating epithets: from the punishment of the gods in the Greco-Roman civilization to the expression of malevolent and diabolical forces in the Middle Ages, from being incurably ill in the 19th century, to a life that does not deserve to be lived during Nazi-fascism to disabled people in today’s society. The latter definition hypocritical like the previous ones, even if not inhuman, categorizing. We must arrive in years very close to us, in 2006, thanks to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, to see the relationship between a person with a disability and the environment recognized and to see the human right to exist sanctioned.

Thanks to Research, in recent decades an ever greater sensitivity has emerged, in the legal and scientific world but also in society, regarding the problems of inclusion in conditions of equality and equality between people.

Salvatore Cimmino

Because words don’t just reflect relationships, they create them.