Outside Reading Post- Outcast

In Moving Violations, John Hockenberry recounts his struggles to be treated as a normal human being. He became paralyzed at age nineteen in a car accident and has been confined to a wheelchair ever since. Even though years have passed, he is unable to get over his obvious differences from most people in society, not because he himself can't, but the rest of the world can't. Everywhere he goes, people are staring at him and treating him as an entirely different class of human. When he and his wife would go out in public, people would ask her questions like, "How long were you married before his got in an accident?", and they were always shocked to find out that they married after Hockenberry was already paralyzed. Hockenberry felt that "it was as though she had joined a leper colony as a way of meeting new people" (132). Even though Hockenberry is a fully capable person, able to take care of himself, people immediately classify him as a helpless deadweight when they see his wheelchair. Hockenberry is painfully aware of how the rest of the world sees him. Being an employee at a care center, he had taken two mentally handicapped clients in wheelchairs down to the beach one day. Although the clients were blissfully unaware, Hockenberry knew how the three of them must have looked to outsiders. "They were oblivious of the skeptical world outside the care center... It seemed that I was trained to look for anticipate, even provoke the very people who would get the wrong idea of what we were doing. I was defending Jeanie and Jeff from a world they were'nt even afraid of. They were mentally retarded... and they seemed more free than I" (130). It appears as though Hockenberry can never be free from the staring and the stereotypes and the prying questions. His appearance automatically sets him apart from the rest of the world. It is so easy to treat someone differently simply because of their outward impression.