Sport, Technologies and Policies on Disability

Genoa, April 23th, 2015

I would like to express my gratitude to all those who were close to me with their affection and their support during all these years. I want to say thank you to those who shared and will continue – I am sure – to share my battle: for a world without barriers and borders.

A particular greeting to all the people I have met on my road which gave me their time and friendship, even though without knowing me.

I started this adventure because I am truly convinced of the importance of sharing. Only by bringing to public attention the difficulties and the bother which People with Disability live daily and sensitizing the awareness, a world fit for all may be build together. If we share the idea of a society taking care of the other and that encourages everyone to make available their skills and abilities, then soon those barriers of mistrust and marginalization may be defeated and tear down. Therefore, us disabled, we may achieve those fundamental goals – as the collectability of the laws regulating disability – preventing that over a billion people stay behind, alone, to face life.

Governments today, which actually are still doing little on disability, should instead start work concretely, facing specifically the reality of disabled evaluating together the part to be solved as a problem and that to consider as a resource to be used for the growth and development of Countries around the world.

Governments must be able to promote the real integration methods, real changing process in the organization of cities, neighbourhoods, transportation, schools, of all public structures. They must take responsibility for promoting an enterprise policy able to industrialize the huge and extraordinary progress made by scientific research and technological development and, in the mean time, allow all disabled to benefit from that.

It is necessary for the health system to consider major investments for the creation of counselling centres for families that must never again must be left alone. It is necessary to facilitate the entrance into employment, enhance the abilities and attitudes of each citizen and, most of all, never allow anyone to remain alone and hopeless.

People with Disability must cooperate helping others to see the obstacles that we face every day; we must commit and do not get tired of talking, showing, helping to give a voice to the voiceless.

My next stage – expected for July of the next year – is Cuba Miami. The goal will be to bring concrete help to free technologies from the drawers of the leading research centres to make them accessible to people with disability. For this reason I will need a lot of support and solidarity.

According to the WHO – World Health Organization – each year over a million amputations are due to diabetes. Every 30 seconds a person is submitted to a lower limb amputation because of diabetes.

According to the WHO, – World Health Organization – the number of new cases of cancer each year will grow from 14 to 22 million in the next 20 years.

According to the WHO, – World Health Organization – it continues to rise the number of victims of accidents and illness in the workplace. The most recent data from the International Work Organization on the occasion of the World Day on Safety and Occupational Health, speak of 268 million non-fatal accidents each year and of 160 million new cases of work-related diseases.

According to the WHO, – World Health Organization – there are 6,000 rare diseases, the 80% have a genetic origin. According to recent estimates, in the 25 European Union Countries about 30 million people suffer from a rare disease, which is the sum of the population of Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg. In Italy there are about 2 million; 70% are children.

These frightening numbers lead us to reflect on the need to engage and empower governments from all the world on issues concerning the fight for accessibility, usability of the technological heritage for the independency of people with disability through research, development and industrialization of prosthesis and intelligent aids.

The majority of persons with disabilities in the morning, as they wake up, have difficulties in planning their day; often they are forced to be satisfied of the simple imagination.

We know very well the reasons of this sad reality: the prosthetic devices and the corresponding aids to their needs are missing; houses are inhospitable because very often are un-provided with elevators for access and exit; work is missing, and this frequently causes disesteem towards themselves. Furthermore, thinking about teenagers, we well know that in some areas of our Country schools are architecturally inaccessible or, even worse reality, lacking of assistant teachers. These conditions compromise that full and harmonious cultural and social development to which all, on paper, deserve.

All of this happens because progress is not equally distributed, it is not accessible to all.

You already know my story. I am disable since I was 14 years old and during my life, until today which I am fifty-eight years old, I have naturally had, as everyone, ups and downs. But the problem, of course, has been always represented by the starting conditions. I believe that a society, to be called civil, should achieve as a goal the wellbeing of people, evaluating its needs and accepting the fundamental needs. But the process I mean is essentially a cultural process.

There is no holding policy, there is no written rule that can be effective and decisive if is not possible, before, to reach the consciousness and the psychological and moral education of citizens. I mean, in substance, that all the debates on immigration, integration and comprehension, will result useless and empty if not accompanied by a real change, deep and radical, of the sense of citizenship and belonging.
Only starting from the acquisition of this knowledge, it will be easy to develop policies that really take charge of those “extra problems”, those differences that often – although minimum – poison the existence of a human being.

Making a slide in homes and public offices will then be natural as it is today natural to build a stairway to reach the upper floor of a house. Do not block the way on sidewalks, not occupying a disabled parking, will turn from rule imposed by law to a spontaneous and expected behaviour and so on until conceiving, finally, the progress of scientific research as a subject to be shared in order to improve the lives of everyone, not just a lucky few.
By now it is many years that, thanks to meeting like the one of today, I have the possibility to tell many people the small and major contradictions that, from my point of view, characterize our Country. On one hand we collect the results of a lively scientific and technologic activity, on the other we still live, in 2015, the paradox of an unsuitable and obsolete document for health benefit prices.

On one hand we enjoy one of the most favourable laws to the integration of disabled people, on the other we serve a cultural delay and a serious lack of policy, that when it comes to cutting funds it does not hesitate on turning the gaze, as first option, to our world. In other words, a schizophrenic attitude that certainly deserves an in-depth analysis, but which I limit myself, unfortunately, to simply underline as a victim.
But then, fortunately, there is the civil society, there is you, which instead certainly pose the issue and work to start real and concrete processes of change.

I believe that by starting from meetings like this it is possible to intervene in the depth of consciences; socializing experiences, analyzing situations, talking and comparing: this represents the only possible exercise to reinvent a new society, to transform the planet into a place for everyone, of all.

Salvatore Cimmino