I initially had no plans to wade into the ‘Me Before You’ movie debate – I felt as though it wasn’t my right to add my own two cents into the pot as the only mobility aid I use is a crutch, and even then it’s used infrequently. Plus, it would have meant watching what appears to be a truly awful ‘romance’ film – it’s the one genre I cannot stomach…
I have no idea what it’s like to be a wheelchair user and can no way equate my experiences with theirs, but I came across an image (when searching for the picture of the anchor I used in last week’s article) that made me do something of an emotional double take.
Because my husband is a graphic designer by trade, I get access to a couple of the image libraries he has accounts with: when you’re trying to drive traffic to your blog the last thing you want is to discover that the image you ripped from Google is going to grant you the pleasure of dealing with a lawsuit.
So, there I was, looking for an image that said ‘burden’. Now, if you type that into google images, you get exactly the kind of pictures and illustrations that I was looking for; people with gigantic rocks on their backs usually trying to get uphill. When I initially searched in the image library, a depiction popped up on the first page that I thought was a teensy bit odd. But, I was already a couple of days over my schedule with the article, so my focus was solely on getting the right illustrations to create the impact I wanted. The results weren’t getting close to the ideas I had in my head, so I searched under other keywords such as ‘crushed under weight’; but the fruits of those searches were even further from what I had in mind. My original keyword was bringing up the ‘best’ of a bad lot of results – I had to return to that.
And there it was again, along the top row of the first page – the photograph that apparently depicted the word ‘burden’. This time, I clicked on it, just to see if there was any logical explanation why an image of a person in a wheelchair was searchable under the keyword of ‘burden’. Only there wasn’t a logical explanation. The description simply said ‘elderly person in wheelchair’.
For almost a week I wondered if I was merely being a tad hypersensitive, then Annie Elainey posted this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVVQb0xoA6I
I think she pretty much covered everything…
Until next time. Don’t waste your spoons!
The Martian Princess Chronicles 