Adam Lovejoy writes from London: Every four years they dress up several dozen handicapped athletes from every country in fancy sportswear and stage the Paralympics – it actually stands for parallel Olympic Games, in case you’re wondering, even though they don’t run parallel to each other – and  it is all supposed to prove that governments care about the disabled and provide them with enough support to help them lead as normal lives as possible. And if you believe that, you might as well believe that politicians care for ordinary people and do everything in their power to improve their lives. (Get off your Prozac, you dimwits, and start living in the real world!)

The Paralympics are a farce, pure and simple. It’s a smokescreen for big mouthed government officials and corporate big shots to boast how  sympathetic they are to human suffering and how they supposedly pump money into programmes that help people with disabilities achieve great things. But once the Paralympics are over, millions of handicapped people will be forgotten till the next big bash in four years’ time, in Brazil of all places which doesn’t really have a good track record when it comes to looking after its disabled.

Let me give you an example of how governments don’t give a damn about disabled people. Have you heard about Prime Minister David Cameron visiting soldiers who were maimed in the war in Afghanistan and are recovering in hospitals? Mr Cameron is too busy for that, you see, even though he carries a direct responsibility for these brave men and women losing their limbs in a war that had stopped making any sense around the second week after it had started. And if you look back at the Labour years in power, you would find that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown never visited the wounded servicemen, even though Blair sent them initially to Iraq and Afghanistan. Not to mention that all the last three great leaders didn’t really demonstrate any desire to help the maimed war veterans with proper money and support to build a new life with their disabilities.

And how about those medical assessments for the disabled to check whether they are actually entitled to their benefits? The stupidity of this exercise is pretty obvious, considering that if someone lost an arm or a leg or suffers from an incurable disease he or she won’t be able to get better and get back to work. And yet these assessments continue and the company that conducts them on behalf of Big Brother even had the nerve to become one of the sponsors of the London Paralympics.

The fact of the matter is that just like the Olympics that have nothing to do with sport for the masses, having been turned into vast corporate events that are used mostly to advertise stuff, the Paralympics are a smokescreen for the general indifference to the fate of millions of disabled people by governments. Not to mention that the Paralympics are held on the cheap, using the facilities that have been already built and are standing idle. It’s not as if the Games for the disabled were held as a special occasion that highlighted the plight of millions of handicapped and the indifference of society to them. No, it’s just a follow up event wrapped up in political correctness and weepy statements about how wonderful it is to watch the disabled athletes achieve great results against all odds.

Funny world we live in. Everything seems to be turned upside down to please the politically correct brigade that loves to talk about its caring side while not making any real effort when it comes to solving real problems.

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