Defining Paralysis Down

Reddit, in all of its various incarnations, is perhaps the greatest example of Sucks and Rocks binary thinking ever created. You can usually watch a consensus being created in real time via the comments and it's frankly terrifying to watch. If you've ever wondered how the Salem Witch Trials and the like went on for so long, then reading the human garbage of Reddit working up their collective agitation on a topic will go a long way towards educating you on the subject.

When Reddit isn't busy crucifying people for various minor sins against social justice, of course, it's often busy serving as a massive hugbox for Millennials who grew up beneath the rotating soft-foam blades of their helicopter parents. What happened on "r/motorcycles" today is a perfect example. Eight months ago, a young motorcyclist had a driver make a left turn in front of him. Today, he's paralyzed. His cry for emotional support, posted yesterday, drew positive thoughts and deeds from an astoundingly diverse group that includes 3D-printer limb designers and a similarly disabled veteran.

There's just one little problem: he's not paralyzed.

What's actually happened is that the nerves in his brachial plexus were damaged, leading him to lose the use of his right arm. He's recently had surgery to move some nerves from his calf to his arm, although it hasn't led to anything positive so far. This is what he writes:

I feel like a ghost of my former self. I started pulling away, shutting everything and everyone out. Save for my girlfriend and my closest friends, I don't see anyone anymore. Today I missed all my classes again because I feel...empty. I have progressively been sinking deeper and deeper into depression and I don't know what to do.

I'm in pain every day of my life. I struggle with even the simplest tasks. I have to ask for help to do everything, and I fucking hate it.

I can't work. I can't ride anymore. I used to be a musician, now my instruments lie gathering dust in my room. I used to love playing videogames, but what good is a huge library if you only have one hand? I used to be active, I used to love climbing, and jumping, and running. I was good at basketball. I was getting my skydiving license. I wanted a future, I had hopes and aspirations and DREAMS. What is the point of trying anymore? What is the point of me getting a degree if I can't do what I want? I was someone and now I'm someone else.

I have two problems with this post. The first, and by far the most serious, is that he calls himself "paralyzed". You'll excuse me for this, but that's some Millennial bullshit right there. He's not paralyzed. He has a paralyzed right arm. He should consider walking over to a VA hospital and asking any of the people there who are in wheelchairs, or who are unable to communicate except by blinking their eyes, just how paralyzed he looks to them.

Furthermore, eight months of immobility after an injury is not necessarily a permanent sentence, particularly for nerve damage. Stephen Murray, who was "quadded" from crushing his C3, C4, and C5 vertebrae during a BMX double backflip, just regained use of his arms after six years. Nerves grow very slowly.

It takes a real double shot of hubris and self-pity to call yourself "paralyzed" in public when you've just lost the use of an arm. It's the Millennial/Reddit/citizen-of-the-internet culture taken to its logical extreme. When "manspreading" on a subway train is equated to rape by leftist media outlets, why can't an arm injury be described as paralysis? Slowly but surely, we're losing meaning in this society, both in terms of the increasingly restricted and binary language permitted in public discourse and thanks to a degraded, dissipated culture that teaches us to judge everything from foreign policy to scientific experimentation based on the impact it has on our personal feelings.

Obviously, our one-armed Redditor knows fucking full well he's not paralyzed, but he wanted to get the maximum sympathy/feels possible from the hugbox, so he decided to phrase it as if that motorcycle accident had rendered him unable to feed himself. Which leads me to my second problem with the post: the modern victim culture that enables all of us to think in terms of what we cannot accomplish because of our victimization.

Read his post above. He can't work. What, was he a longshoreman? He claims he can't play music. In the era of the lute and pennywhistle, that would make sense, but given that most Top 40 records nowadays are done on a computer I kind of doubt it. Note that he had no trouble posting a long screed to Reddit. He's in pain every day of his life. A lot of people are. There are only two people living full-time in my house, but both of us are in pain every day.

I can't help but compare his attitude to how I behaved when I broke my leg, my hip, and my C2 neckbone back in '88. It never occurred to me that I wouldn't make it back and ride my bikes and do all the things that I wanted to do, including getting my pro BMX license. It's true that my life was never pain-free after March of 1988, and it's also true that I never rode BMX to the level of which I dreamed, but I still managed to get shit done in one form or another. Most importantly, that crash was what turned me into a writer. It was half a year of bedridden introspection punctuated by humiliationa great and small, painful scrubbing of my wounds, insomnia, vomiting, and a wholesale re-evaluation of my place in the world.

Before the accident, my life plan had been to join the Marine Corps that summer and try my hand at being an enlisted serviceman. I didn't want to go to college. That was for pansy-asses. I wanted to go where the action was, where the fighting was. I wanted to see what I was made of. Well, I got that chance, just in a different way. My life didn't turn out the way I'd planned it, but it did turn out. Maybe it even turned out for the best. I doubt I'd have been a very effective Marine sergeant.

Of course, I had two advantages that this fellow probably doesn't have: my parents. It was made plain to me from the moment my rented hospital bed and I were were wheeled into Mom's house that nobody was really interested in hearing me whine and moan about my injuries. I certainly concealed a lot of pain and anguish from them as a result; to this day I still have a lot of numbness and pain in my extremities that I attribute to the cracked and unevenly healed bone around my spinal cord. But I didn't say anything because I didn't want anybody to keep me from riding a bicycle and I didn't want to be called a whiner by Mom or Dad. I can imagine today how they both felt about my injuries, because when my son scratches his hand my first impulse is to call for two LifeFlight helicopters and the Mayo Clinic. But they kept it to themselves. It was a blessing.

With all of the above said, I'm still sympathetic to this injured motorcyclist for a few reasons. It sucks to get hurt on your motorcycle and I really hope he can ride again, on his own terms. I know what it's like to be critically injured and I wouldn't wish that on anybody.

Most of all, however, I'm sympathetic because this kid's post was a wake-up call to me. For the past five months I've been moping and feeling sorry for myself because my broken left leg just isn't coming back the way I want it to. Starting this afternoon, I'm going to let that shit go. Whatever further surgeries I need, I'll get. Whatever rehab is necessary, I'll do it. And whatever functionality I can get back --- right now, it's enough to ride a motorcycle but not enough to bunnyhop a BMX bike --- I'll accept with gratitude. Sometimes you can't see a failure of character or courage in yourself until it's writ large enough in someone else. This doesn't mean I'll make it to the starting line at Elsinore in 2016; right now the knee doesn't work well enough to be dependable. But I wouldn't bet against it for 2017. I'll close with some prophetic but also admirable lines from Layne Staley:

In the darkest hole, you'd be well advised Not to plan my funeral 'fore the body dies, yeah Come the morning light, it's a see through show