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This article was published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on October 25, 2006 and is reprinted with permission.

Each October we celebrate National Disability Employment Awareness Month, yet we have made little or no progress toward initiating the open, mature public dialogue essential to improving public awareness on disability. As a result, we continue to endure the human and economic costs inflicted by attitudes and policies shaped by widely held, but false, assumptions and myths.

As things stand now, the general public is consistently, spectacularly wrong in nearly every truth it holds dear about the experience of life with a disability.

When I say that to someone, that person usually will look sad and thoughtful and nod in agreement, and I'll know that person is thinking, "He's right; I couldn't possibly imagine how horrible it must be."

Let me tell you, every one of us has much more than enough experience imagining how horrible it must be, and if our imaginations were ever to fail us in this regard, we could always count on Hollywood to shovel out yet another overblown, melodramatic, cliché-riddled treatment to help us along. What the general public is unprepared to imagine is just how wonderful, rewarding and full of accomplishment life with a severe disability usually is.

There have been dozens of studies that have shown not just a disconnect but rather an immense chasm--we're talking the Grand Canyon here--between the popular assumptions and the actual experiences of people with disabilities. One of the earlier studies compared overall satisfaction and happiness rates for people with paraplegia and people who had won the lottery, and found not much difference. I buy lottery tickets, and I see this as very good news. Since my odds of having a spinal-cord injury are much better than they are for picking those winning numbers, it's good to know that either way, once I make it through the disruptive process of adjustment to the dramatic changes in my life, I'll probably end up being about as happy as I am right now.

The kinds of things that the popular perception of the experience of significant disability consistently and spectacularly underestimates include: what we can do; how happy we are; our level of self-esteem and virtually every other measure of competence, productivity and quality of life.

All of this plays well for telethons, personal-injury suits and other efforts to tug at heartstrings to loosen purse strings, but it's a real disadvantage in any endeavor that requires being accepted as a competent, functioning adult. Some examples include

applying for a job, trying to get a date, rent an apartment, preserve parental rights or help someone else understand that disability is first and foremost a civil-rights issue.

We must develop a public dialogue that actively challenges the preconceptions and stereotypes about people who have disabilities, forces an examination of those beliefs and replaces them with beliefs informed by the actual experiences of people with disabilities. In other words, we need to talk.

We need to talk about the backlash currently directed against the Americans with Disabilities Act. We need to talk about why the only right of a person who has a disability that seems to be capable of commanding the public's attention and inspiring the media is the right to die.

We need to be talking about why there remains so much distance and misunderstanding between the disability-rights movement and its progenitors, those earlier civil-rights movements that by their example taught people with disabilities how to understand the nature of our predicament and provided us with the model for redressing it.

Because of the failure to develop this discourse, myths about disability are so uncritically accepted as common knowledge that they nearly crowd all serious discussion of the reality of the experience of disability from the mainstream marketplace of ideas.

Most of us know people with disabilities who are going about their lives, working, supporting themselves and their families and actively contributing to the diversity and vitality of our communities. But these examples can be before us on a daily basis and have surprisingly little impact on our preconceptions. We accommodate our stereotypes by perceiving such people to be something extraordinary. We need to challenge that. We should not see people with significant disabilities who have achieved some measure of satisfaction and success as brave, heroic or inspirational. Such people should be the norm. Such people should be exactly what we expect.

Instead, we should be looking at the lives of people with disabilities who have been denied those experiences and asking what went wrong.

Toby Olson is the Executive Secretary of the Washington State Governor's Committee on Disability Issues and Employment.

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