PROPERTY OWNERS SPEAK OUT AGAINST DISABLED AMERICANS

CONSIDERED OPINION

By : Mr. Irwin D. Gallant, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Lexington Property Management Group LLC (A Delaware Limited Liability Company specializing in commercial property rentals to Fortune 500 companies in cities across the Nation); Harvard Business School (M.B.A. summa cum laude 1990); Avid Jogger; Amateur clockmaker and watch collector; Christian; aficionado of numerous activities requiring undamaged arms and legs.

Hey you. Yeah, you: The fat fuck in the wheelchair. Get a goddamn move on it. I've got a whole line of customers trying to get into the store, and there you are struggling to maneuver your fucking lard cart through that double door. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know you're disabled. But it's about damn time for property owners like me to tell you what we really feel: We can't fucking stand your lame asses.

How many times have property owners felt this way? They all do--every day. Disabled people are simply not fast enough to keep up with the pace of business in America. They frustrate normal people with functioning legs who are just trying to go to work, buy a few groceries and get home before 10 PM. And how much money have property owners spent trying to accommodate these worthless crippled fuckers? Let me give you a ballpark: BILLIONS!@!@! And I'll tell you another thing: Building expensive ramps for drooling fucktards with canes has driven numerous enterprising Americans straight out of business.

America faces worse threats than foreign terrorism. As a property owner and businessman, I can say without hesitation that the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) is the greatest threat to liberty this Nation has ever encountered. Fuck the Times Square bomber; he didn't hurt anyone. But the ADA hurts honest business owners every day by requiring them to build costly additions to their properties on their own nickel. And when business owners hurt, the whole country hurts.

Think about it: The Red Lobster on West 41st Street could have hired 100 dishwashers and 50 waiters in 2009 if it hadn't had to install a freaking "supplemental dumbwaiter" to lift paralyzed midgets from the dining room to the balcony. So in the end, a few lazy fuckheads got to eat the fried shrimp special in 2009, while 150 people lost their jobs. Fair trade? I think not.

Liberty is about owning property and doing whatever you want with it. Liberty is also about making as much money as you can from your property without worrying about other people. But the ADA forces property owners to do things with their property that they'd rather not do. It forces them to accommodate people on their premises who do not help them make more money. This violates property owners' liberty. It also robs them blind by compelling them to build doorways, elevators, extra exits and conveyor belts all over the place. That shit is expensive. And when business owners spend money on useless shit like that, it prevents them from paying out dividends, hiring people or opening new locations.

Put simply, the ADA is a terrorist law because it tramples liberty. In fact, most business owners would simply prefer to die in a car bomb explosion than watch their companies go bankrupt after wasting all their money on unnecessary elevators. Castrating a business' economic potential is just as terroristic as slamming airplane into a skyscraper. The result is the same: People lose their jobs--and their lives. And both are scary.

When we reflect on just how much it costs to comply with the ADA, we must ask ourselves: For what? What do we get for destroying businesses and bankrupting property owners? What do we get for boosting unemployment and dampening our prosperity? A society in which crippled fucktards can wheel into any building they want to spend their pension money.

I know it's "American" to say that everyone deserves an "equal opportunity" to see the Yankees or eat at Red Lobster. But who really gives a flying fuck about some paraplegic kid with a tube down his throat? OK, so we build him his own goddamn elevator and his own goddamn entrance door. Once he's in, does he spend money? Maybe his mother buys him a candy bar, a hot dog or some shit… oh wait, he eats through a tube. Never mind. What I mean is that crippled fucktards don't usually have much money to spend, and there aren't that many of them anyway. So basically property owners waste all that money accommodating them; and they get zero in return. In business, that's called a loser bet. And that's exactly what the ADA forces property owners to do.

I know what you're thinking: How can I be so mean when talking about Americans with disabilities? Well, I've got a simple answer: Because I'm honest. Life isn't easy in America. It isn't easy to run a profitable business and pay your bills. Life is fast-paced; if you can't hack it, you can't hack it. It's hard enough to turn a profit even with full body function; you can just forget about it you're legless. If you had the bad luck to get crippled--or you were born with some freakish defect that condemns you to lifetime care--that's your problem. You have no business doing business. You shouldn't be in the race. Sorry about that. That's just the way the ball bounces, mon frère. Apply for charity or something. Just don't stand in line or apply for a job with everyone else. You really annoy us.

Normal Americans just plain don't like being around crippled people. It makes them uncomfortable. When a family goes to the museum, they don't like waiting for a half-dead, moaning retard on a motorized gurney to navigate a narrow passageway. When young professionals go to a discotheque on Friday night, they don't like waiting two minutes for a blind war veteran on two canes to hop his way up the steps. When hardworking American workers get home at night, the last thing they want is to wait for a paralyzed woman to fish out pocket change in line at the grocery store.

In a word, crippled people frustrate and frighten everyone around them. Nobody likes them. Nobody has patience for them. In that sense, it is perplexing that the ADA forces both business owners and customers to deal with them on even terms. If it were up to the American people, they would stay away from cripples like the black death. But the law forces Americans to treat them "equally." This is both wrong and unjust.

To summarize: Commercial life is fast-paced; and disabled Americans are not fast-paced. They simply cannot cut the mustard. From an evolutionary standpoint, crippled people don't belong in commercial life. They can't keep up. That's the truth, no matter what goody-goody rhetoric apologists on it. If it came between hiring an able-bodied man and a wheelchair-bound man for the same job, no rational employer would ever hire the cripple. Why should he? If both men had the mental ability to do the job, why hire the man who needs a special entrance door and elevator just to get into the building? Why assume the extra trouble? In business, we move fast. We avoid inconvenience when we can. And cripples are inconvenient. The bottom line is that we don't have time to be nice. Time is money. So we hire the man who takes less time to do the same job. Plus he can get up and run errands once in a while.

Commercial life is like nature: Only the strong survive. Yet the ADA compels commercial actors to accommodate cripples and hire them on equal terms, no matter how unprofitable it may be. This is not only counter-evolutionary. It is also unnatural. Would a bee colony support bees without wings? Would a cattle herd help a cow with broken legs? Certainly not: Caring for cripples threatens the well-being of the healthy community. Commerce, like nature, is a death struggle against bankruptcy. Just as a herd depends on healthy, contributing members to avoid death in nature, so too do commercial actors depend on healthy, contributing employees to avoid bankruptcy in commerce. And just as a herd abandons crippled members to avoid death in nature, so too do commercial actors jettison crippled employees to avoid bankruptcy in commerce. In this light, the ADA forces commercial actors to unnaturally hire crippled workers who do more harm than good for the enterprise.

Viewed as a whole, the ADA terrorizes liberty and makes war on nature. In the name of "decency, compassion and humanity," it forces property owners into bankruptcy just to accommodate worthless crippled Americans. It hamstrings employers by forcing them to hire employees who are physically unable to make money. And it frustrates everyday Americans by forcing them to watch pathetic cripples take entirely too long to accomplish rudimentary commercial activities, like boarding a bus.

What is liberty if not the freedom to spend money as we please, to hire whom we please and to keep the company we please? And what is liberty if we must spend money in ways we'd rather not, hire clearly unsatisfactory people and keep uncomfortable company with paralyzed invalids who defecate on themselves in public? That is not liberty--that is terrorism.

As a property owner and an American, I say with all my heart: The Americans with Disabilities Act is terrorism. And I believe in freedom. That means the freedom to shut out cripples from movie theaters and fire people without arms. And it also means the freedom to walk into a grocery store at 6:45 PM without fear that a deaf-mute fucktard on crutches will hold up the line for seven minutes.

I speak for all Americans who believe in unrestricted commerce when I say: "Hey lady. Yeah, you, the amputee. Pick up the fucking pace, will you? I just got out of work. Friends is on soon and I'll be damned if you take two more fucking minutes to pay for that soup."

OUR URGE TO BE FREE IS NOT ENTIRELY REASONABLE

AN ESSAY

We always hear about doomed criminals running away from the police. Chases always make the news. They seem to happen in California more than anywhere else. But no matter where they happen, the key element remains the same: Some desperate person tries frantically to delay the moment at which he will be physically restrained. He wants to be free. He wants control over his own body. So he thrashes with incredible energy to maintain that control. He even puts himself and others in mortal danger for a few more free moments. Even the most insignificant infractions put people to desperate flight. They even cause fatal car crashes while trying to escape from a traffic stop. In other words, men love freedom; and they cling to it no matter the cost or the danger.

Freedom has many meanings. It is a common word. George W. Bush used it ad nauseam as shorthand for a complex, biased political value system that had nothing to do with "a lack of restraint on physical movement." But today I want to examine the word's base, bodily meaning, not its metaphorical or rhetorical overlays. "Freedom" is an old English noun that stems from the adjective "free," which in turn relates to the German "frei." In essence, it implies a "lack of physical restraint on bodily movement." At base, it is corporal. It suggests an ability to move the body without being held back. It also suggests an ability to "go where one pleases" without facing opposing physical forces. In this sense, a "lack of physical restraint" intertwines with mental tranquility. People like to go where they want. No one likes to know he could be physically stopped from going somewhere. Physical "freedom," then, closely relates to mental "freedom," and even happiness: You can't be happy if someone prevents you from using your body as you please. Emotional satisfaction flows from physical freedom.

I like the words "free" and "freedom" more than "liberty." I am partial to hard-hitting, German-based words over obscure, imported Latin ones. "Liberty" is a Latin refinement on "freedom." At times, "freedom" and "liberty" mean the same thing. Yet "liberty" sounds somehow more grandiose than mere "freedom." During the Enlightenment, philosophers opted for majestic "liberty" over plebeian "freedom" when discussing man's "natural rights." In the process, they transformed "liberty" into a technical term. "Liberty" was no longer a simple synonym for "freedom." No, "liberty" carried its own theoretical weight. It became shorthand for an entire economic and social value system premised upon "individual choice, conscience and enterprise." John Stuart Mill named his famous ode to free market economic choice "On Liberty," while Adam Smith based The Wealth of Nations on the fundamental assumption that man must enjoy "economic liberty." In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson famously asserted that man's "inalienable rights" included life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." In all these examples, "liberty" took on a meaning far beyond "lack of restraint on bodily movement." It was something more than just "going where you want when you want." It was something freighted with metaphysical assumptions.

But today I am not writing about Mill's "liberty conception" or even "economic liberty." I am writing about pure, animal "freedom:" The subjective desire to be free from direct bodily restraint. Based upon my own observations, I believe that human beings have a natural desire to be free. There is both a physical and emotional dimension to this desire. Human beings--like their mammalian forebears--relish the ability to move as they please. They feel at ease when nothing constrains their bodies. By the same token, they hate the emotion that arises when some superior power prevents them from moving their bodies as they please. Dogs and monkeys scream when caged. They become agitated and violent. They obviously do not like limitations on their freedom to move. When restrained, their behavior shows they hate it.

Human beings hate being confined, too. Unlike animals, they know when others seek to confine them. That is why they struggle to avoid capture and "maintain their freedom," even if there is no prospect for success. They know how they will feel when they lose their bodily freedom, so they resort to anything to hold onto it. Human beings anticipate the emotional pain that flows from losing freedom. That explains why doomed criminals flee in desperate attempts to remain free. Even when they have no chance to succeed, people will always try to escape, if only for a few minutes.

But how is that reasonable? If there is no chance to succeed in an endeavor, why bother attempting it? In my view, the "urge to be free from bodily restraint" trumps human reason. After all, if human beings trusted their reason in all events, they would never try to avoid inevitable capture. They would not jump over electrified fences or drive 85 miles per hour the wrong way down a one-way street if reason guided their actions. No, something else guides their actions when they feel something threatens their freedom. Human beings will resort to utterly unreasonable behavior to avoid physical restraint. The "urge to be free" transcends virtually all reasonable imperatives. It overwhelms rational calculation and leads men to engage in dangerous behavior that is almost bound to fail.

In my eyes, all this proves that human beings are not purely reasonable creatures. No matter how much we applaud our ability to triumph over nature through reason, we retain extremely unsettling instincts. Our "urge to be free from bodily restraint" illustrates the lengths to which human beings will go to maintain their ability to move their bodies as they wish. Viewed rationally, who would think that mere bodily movement could trigger such intense emotional responses? But that is exactly the point: Reason cannot account for men's violent emotional responses to certain stimuli. For better or worse, men want control over their bodies, just as chimps and dogs want to roam uncaged. And just like chimps and dogs, they rage uncontrollably when anything constrains their ability to roam.

Physical confinement touches a base nerve in our minds. That explains why human beings resort to anything to avoid it, no matter how unreasonable or ineffectual. This has nothing to do with complex coinages like "liberty." It is just a fact of nature. And we will never escape nature.