Don't judge a book by its cover

I usually browse through the daily headlines in yahoo homepage before I proceed to checking my emails. One yahoo news caught my attention today and it was about a mother writing an Open letter to someone who had shamed her daughter for parking in handicap parking space. The story happened in Ohio, USA and goes on to describe that the daughter who is in college found a handwritten note attached to her windshield on her way out of a grocery store.

The note says: You should be ashamed, when you take a handicap spot an actual disabled person suffers. You were not raised as you should have been.

What the person who wrote the note did not know is that this girl is actually suffering from LUPUS. It is an unobvious chronic autoimmune disease. The article defines that the effects of Lupus can be debilitating, leaving those who suffer from it with agonizing pain throughout their skin, joints and internal organs. Despite the pain, many sufferers go through their daily lives without showing any obvious external effects.

In response to the harsh message, the mother of the girl wrote the following response in facebook. The message has since been shared more than 170 000 times.

“To The Person Who Left This on My Daughters Car,

Wishing so much for you to have stopped and talked to this amazing person before leaving this. If you had, you would have known that my daughter has a disease. Since she was 16 years old, she has been suffering from LUPUS. Basically, her immune system thinks her body inside and out is something bad and attacks it. It started with her joints swelling and the pain being so bad she could hardly walk. But she continued going to school and keeping up with her community service.”

This goes to show how insensitive people can be. How easily people can misunderstand and judge the book by its cover. At the same time, I also do not fully blame the person who wrote the message, there are really some people who do not have any disability but mis-use the handicap parking. In this case, he or she really just posted this at the wrong time to the wrong person.

For the full article access here: https://www.yahoo.com/health/moms-open-letter-to-handicap-parking-shamer-116388141197.html