Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Living with a disability in Korea

I read this article last week about KBS hiring a disabled person as an anchor .  KBS is a broadcasting system for Korea and it recently stated that it hired one of its first disabled news anchors.  In America something like this would never make news unless it was a famous person or had some significant meaning to the public.  There are  laws to protect individuals from discrimination of race, gender, and even disability when it comes to finding work. This does not mean an employer may not subconsciously be judging or choose another candidate over one that "appears" not to be able to complete the task as well as another. This would cause a lot of frustration among people I know if this were how things were run in America.

One of the interesting things about Korea is that most people with disabilities are rarely seen in society.  A lot of elderly and people with disabilities live in the shigol/countryside because many of the cities cannot entirely accommodate people with major disabilities. If such people do exist in the cities, they probably remain at home.
I hope that what this article says is true and that it will encourage other companies to in the future hire more people with visible differences whether or not they may be physical disabilities.  A physical disability does not constitute a mental disability. Plenty of elderly people lose control of their bodies before their minds.  (Although quite a bit do lose their minds before their bodies.)  People with muscular diseases may have trouble walking or speaking, but can perform with IQs much greater than the average person. For example,look at Stephen Hawking, and English physicist who lived with ALS, a motor neuron disease. He is a very well known scientist that  served as a professor in some of the best universities as well as traveled the world speaking about his work.

I want to see more accommodation and awareness for people with disabilities.  I don't want my friends, brothers, and sisters to be hidden from society because of a disability.  




1 comment:

Haruming Citra Putri -uming- said...

hello, i'm Uming from Indonesia. nice to meet you :)
i like this article so much, especially the closing statement. may i quote it? :)