Going in the back door

So, most people do like to enter houses, museums, banks, etc through the FRONT door.  The front door is how you get in .  In days past the tradesmen, seen as lower status either went trough a side door or the back door.  There was a ranking of whom should go through the front door and whom should not! this applied to black people too!

You simply knew your status. it was and remains discriminatory.

As a wheelchair user, particularly in public and on long trips I am utterly sick of the back door entrance for wheelchair users to all sorts of places. :Usually the 'back entrance' is down an alley,  scruffy, unkempt and smelly and nasty.  Corridors unpainted, or dirty, mops, bikes, boxes, piled against the walls.

This weekend I gave a lecture at a conference.  The organisers told me that my taxi would have to take me to the back entrance for access. I said sarcastically "Oh, when did disabled people EVER go through the FRONT door"?   Now I'm not criticising the group who organised this venue.  they had little money for a posh venue and even the front entrance was woeful. But the taxi man could not find the back entrance and when he did the road and pavements were dire.

Having cause to see a solicitor recently in a big Dublin firm the disability access point was...guess...at the back.  but I did not know this.  Until I arrived. the taxi man found it and there was an old outdoor lift. We couldn't use it so taxi man ran inside to get someone whilst I sat in the cold outside.  A man came and said "you didn't tell us you were coming" .  No, I just went to see my solicitor. I'm sick, too, of the inconvenience of planning my every move.

The lift was ghastly, old and rickety.  It 'spoke' of no care, respect or anything remotely welcoming to the disabled person. It was insulting.

The very notion of a 'back door entrance' for disabled people is disrespectful. It is inconvenient, usually adding stress upon stress, first in finding it, then in getting someone to open the door.

It is argued that some buildings are too old to enable wheelchair access through the front. I don't go with this one.  The fact is most places don't want to, as they see it, ruin the façade of the front of the building by putting a ramp or lift there. or its too expensive, so they say.  so what, equality means making your front entrance useable by everyone.  Equal means, all having the same access facilities, the front door!

In future I am going to refuse to go in the back entrance, and I'm going to make every fuss short of being arrested to voice my views. it's time we disabled people realised that we should not be 'grateful' for the scutty alley, the torrid corridors, the wait in the cold until little used back doors are unbolted, opened.

And why should I be polite....if I feel a second class citizen in these arrangements than that's how I feel. I don't like it . It's not 'equality', it's second best.

I'm not settling for back doors and feeling 'grateful' anymore.