Junior Theme Post #1

Last Monday our class began research on one of the most daunting junior year projects of them all...Junior Theme. We had to come up with four or five "why" questions about American issues that we wanted to research. One of my questions that I came up with originally was "why do Americans continue to be intolerant of people with disabilities?" I thought this was a good question, there was a lot that I could research on it historically, but then a few problems arose. I was faced with the task of coming up with a modern example of such intolerance, which was difficult to find. One example I came up with was the Spread the Word to End the Word campaign, a campaign that I recently blogged about aimed at stopping the use of the r-word. But this campaign alone was not enough to base my whole paper off of.
At first, I was extremely frustrated that I could not find an example of modern day intolerance. While I know there still is intolerance today, there was no big event that I could base my paper on. But then I began to realize that this is not such a bad thing. Clearly there has been much improvement with the treating of individuals with disabilities. America has taken great strides in the understanding, and awareness of physical and mental disabilities. People with disabilities are landing roles on tv shows, and in movies, campaigns like Spread the Word are taking place, and more and more opportunities keep coming for people with special needs.