Backlash over reactions to Hawking’s death

HWH commentary

I’ve often heard people at funeral homes remark that the deceased is free now – people who died who were not in wheelchairs. To some, life on earth is a torturous experience. Death is thought to free us. Free at last. The pain is gone. His suffering, her suffering, is over. The deceased made it across the rainbow bridge, he/she is in a better place. People on life support, family members say the same thing.

I don’t begrudge anybody their condolences and the way they express them. People cross a line when they dictate to others what they should say in their condolence messages. Control freaks in wheelchairs deny others their freedom to speak their true feelings? That appears to be the message in the comment section under the title: Reactions to Stephen Hawking’s death slammed as ‘ableist’ — here’s why

Yahoo Lifestyle Erin Donnelly,Yahoo Lifestyle 3.15.2018

This sand storm is a ploy against people without wheelchairs to raise awareness about people with wheelchairs, as well an effort to keep his name in the news, which is both patronizing and exploitive. Pity for people in wheelchairs is not what actual people in wheelchairs want, but that’s what activists for people with disabilities made of his death by focusing on what people should and shouldn’t say and the way they should or shouldn’t say it. Get over it. He’s dead.

Disabled people aren’t any more worthy and have no more integrity than anybody else. Nobody needs a lesson here except the activists trying to exploit the death of Stephen Hawking – for no other reason than he was in a wheelchair.

Geeze, he’s dead and he still can’t get out of that chair, because you won’t let him? You’re in a chair, so you want to keep him in his, even dead? Many of those posting aren’t actually wheelchair bound. I live in a building with people in wheelchairs, lots of them. They don’t talk like that.

Here we go with the social engineering again. The only thing not fake about this story is that he’s dead and his wheelchair is still here without him in it. Poof. He’s free now.

IN THE NEWS: Backlash over reactions to Hawking’s death