A full Stadium for the London 2012 Paralympics has had an opening ceremony uplifting in every possible way.
At its start and finish, athletes actually flew – visually beautiful and a poignant and magical release for those who so often live in an earthbound struggle with their bodies.
The single most breathtaking moment was a floor dance by a man with no legs – it was utterly exquisite, fluid, borrowing from breakdance, attuned to the floor and suddenly lifting into flight. Unforgettable.
The event opened with another transformation – Benjamin Britten’s quite wonderful setting of the National Anthem, slow, with complex harmonies, hauntingly sung by a 450 strong deaf choir, making a pretty banal anthem a thing of beauty.
Professor Stephen Hawking’s Big Bang theory became a theatrical reality, with constellations of lit umbrellas spinning away in the darkness from the initial explosion in a mysterious light show.
The parade of the athletes was a sea of grins, colour, mobile phone cameras, shining eyes and, above all things, admiration and inclusion.
Athletes on what looked like anchored vaulting poles soared and dropped, waving in the air like tall poppies in a breeze. This looked at once scary and SO desirable. You wanted to be on one. They were actually the eyelashes around a giant eye.
Royal Marine Joe Townsend, who lost both his legs treading on an IED on his first tour in Afghanistan, flew in at the end with the flame on a zip wire from the Orbit Tower outside the stadium.
It was then carried around the stadium and used to light the mobile cauldron that took all our breaths away at the Olympics a few weeks ago.
Yes, you could say that the show (entitled ‘Enlightenment’) was incoherent – with dollops of Shakespeare (Ian McKellan on overtime); punctuations from Stephen Hawking, floating apples to raise the ghost of Isaac Newton and books galore – massive page turners all of them – but none of that matters.
It looked magical, it lifted spirits, it liberated and in every part of it, it celebrated those who really do overcome.
Now for the games.
Afraid the hypocrisy of the Paralympic Games is tainting my desire to watch it, which is wrong. I normally do watch them, in fact usually more than the main Olympics, but this year too much is just infuriating me.
The fact that David Cameron is there kidding on to be supporting disabled people is just vile and that ATOS is sponsoring is just disgusting.
I wonder how many of the competitors are being checked as to which benefits they might be receiving and targetted with all other disabled people in the country to bear the brunt of the country’s debts whilst bankers and the rich are cheating the system of billions in tax avoidance.
Sickening. However, good luck to all the competitors, truly awe-inspiring people.
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What evidence do you have that David Cameron is ‘kidding on about supporting disabled people’? This is a really heartless and ignorant comment on someone who has had direct experience of a disabled child. Shame on you.
And why is ATOS’s support so disgusting, really?
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Its doubly shameful from Cameron as he does have personal experience of this and yet has ordered ATOS to automatically reject 7 out of 8 benefits claims.
Mel, are you hiding up a mountain or something?
Are you unaware of the Panorama and Channel 4 programs that went out the other week there where they had infiltrated ATOS and got confirmation of all this?
Benefit is not being assessed on need, its being decided on by meeting targets.
ATOS sponsoring an event for disabled people when they are unilaterally taking benefits from disabled people who desperately need them.
Last I read over 40% of ATOS rejected cases are turned around on appeal.
Maybe its because they aren’t even contacting Doctors to give them the information needed and instead are using people with very basic and limited medical knowledge.
Seriously Mel, I’m not ashamed. I’m mortified that there is still such ignorance.
Perhaps a bit of research will benefit you before you start slagging me off.
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Of course I’m aware of the furore of ATOS and benefit eligibility assessments, but feel it’s too easy to simply jump on the bandwagon and scream outrage.
I am very dismayed that you still choose to claim David Cameron is ‘kidding on’ given his personal circumstance. I asked what evidence you have to support that statement, to which you have responded only by accusing me of ignorance and lack of research.
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So are ATOS acting on their own instruction then?
Who has told them to reject 7 out of 8 claims? Santa?
And if by some ridiculous chance you don’t believe its DC and his Tory Government – why haven’t they intervened and told ATOS to assess these things fairly or even better sacked them?
If David Cameron did have any empathy or compassion due to his own situation, why is he allowing the persecution and distress of those most in need?
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We have to hope – perhaps we have to MAKE – this event and the change of public attitude to the disabled that is taking place around it a catalyst for change at higher altitudes. Cameron has been vacuous and patronising and the ATOS situation is beyond satire..
We have been stunned by the fact that the torches to carry the flame – the same flame – for the Paralymics, were the same design as for the Olympics – but silver.
Silver is not so precious a metal as gold and, in medal terms, silver is second place.
There is reason in wanting to make the torches for a different event distinctive – but slackly staying in the same code makes an uacceptable statement of relative perceived value.
If they had made them red they would have been distinctive and top rank in a different power code.
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And you are just as heartless and ignorant.
What a lot of drivel you write.
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Worth also noting that 12 of the doctors working for ATOS are under investigation. ATOS sponsoring the Paralympics is a little like Margaret Thatcher championing healthy school meals!
I particularly remember the man waiting foR a heart operation who ATOS passed as fit. He died within 5 weeks. Then there was the person sectioned under the mental health Act – fit for work said ATOL.
I have no overall problem with the concept of trying to reduce benefit fraud but this is not the way to do it – it is attempting to reduce the deficit by a blunt instrument approach which hits those most in need the hardest.
David Cameron, and every Tory and Lib Dem (and anyone else), who support this should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
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