It’s not often that Channel 5 (sorry “Five”) grabs my attention for doing something splendid and worthwhile but they certainly have with this week’s policy of getting someone with a facial disfigurement to read the news.
If you've not hear of this, click on the link and go and take a look at what it's all been about.
Like a lot of “disabilities” - and I’m using that term in the very broadest sense of the word – what seems remarkably/different/surprising/shocking at first rapidly becomes ordinary or commonplace once we’ve seen it for a while.
See someone in a wheelchair, with dark glasses and a white stick, unable to speak or with a missing limb and the chances are that that’s the “feature” you notice about them straight away. Spend a little time in their company though and it rapidly becomes something that you no longer “notice”, not in the literal sense but just that you no longer think only of this “feature". You listen to what they’re saying, what they’re doing, what they can tell you, etc.
Society does a good job of hiding people with facial disfigurements. If this action by Five makes them seem a little bit less “unusual” then it will have been worth it.
What a positive thing to be writing about.
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