It's a Small-Minded World, Disney Learns
Because parents scammed the theme parks, now disabled children will lose out.
By
BOB GREENE
If you have ever been to a Disney DIS -1.07% theme park, and have seen a family with a disabled child escorted to the front of a long line to a ride, has your reaction been:
1. To offer a silent prayer of thanks for your own family's good fortune to be healthy and able-bodied;
2. To think good thoughts about Disney for having the compassion to take care of the park's disabled guests this way; or:
3. To regard this as a great opportunity for you to pull a con, an easy way to turn the situation to your own family's advantage?
Apparently answer No. 3 is more common than you might hope, because this week the Walt Disney Co. announced a significant change to procedures at Walt Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California. No longer will families with disabled children or parents be allowed to go to the front of long lines.
One of the reasons for the change, a Disney spokeswoman told the Orange County Register, was to curtail "abuse of this system" by healthy families pretending that some of its members are ill or disabled.
In May, the New York Post reported that wealthy parents were hiring disabled "tour guides" to blend in with their families and enable them to go to the front of lines. As coldly cynical as this sounded, as snickeringly selfish, there was more: Websites serving families with disabled children featured message boards with infuriating tales of healthy people renting wheelchairs to avoid waiting in Disney theme-park lines.
Thus, Disney is initiating a new policy to take effect early next month. Families with disabled children or parents may apply for a variation of a current Disney program that instructs visitors to report to a ride during a specified window of time. But the front-of-the-line privileges extended to chronically ill or disabled boys and girls are over. And few people will be startled if the new passes feature photo IDs, to prevent them from being sold by scalpers to healthy visitors to the parks.
Don't blame Disney for this. The company's long-standing impulse to provide front-of-the-line consideration for customers with physical disabilities has been commendable. Yet, short of positioning a physician at the entrance to every ride to ascertain the legitimacy of a person's ailment, what was the company to do?
The fault lies directly with those parents who evidently think nothing of conniving their way to an unfair edge in the world, including even feigning that they or their children suffer disabilities.
Who is really being hurt if healthy people figure out a way to skip the lines? For starters, the children who genuinely are chronically ill or disabled, the children whose fevers and tremors are real. They may not have been given many breaks in their short time on earth, but Disney traditionally granted them one.
There are other people, though, who, in a more subtle manner, are hurt in the long term: the able-bodied children who have been shown by their parents that gaming the system, that faking disabilities, is what smart people do. That it's the clever way, the winner's way. Only suckers, no matter how healthy, wait in line. It's a lesson thatsadlywill stick.
Walt Disney, long ago, had the dream of building an enchanted place. He built it.
And then the people came. Which begat the current problem. The honor system, evidently, is officially obsolete.
The only surprise may be that it has taken this long. And what of those children who really do need their wheelchairs or leg braces? Those children whose fragile medical conditions make a day at a Disney park a rare and wonderful, but tenuous and wearying, occasion?
Their parents can say to them, truthfully:
The reason the rules have changed is that some other mothers and fathers told their children to pretend their lives are as hard as yours.
Because parents scammed the theme parks, now disabled children will lose out.
By
BOB GREENE
If you have ever been to a Disney DIS -1.07% theme park, and have seen a family with a disabled child escorted to the front of a long line to a ride, has your reaction been:
1. To offer a silent prayer of thanks for your own family's good fortune to be healthy and able-bodied;
2. To think good thoughts about Disney for having the compassion to take care of the park's disabled guests this way; or:
3. To regard this as a great opportunity for you to pull a con, an easy way to turn the situation to your own family's advantage?
Apparently answer No. 3 is more common than you might hope, because this week the Walt Disney Co. announced a significant change to procedures at Walt Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California. No longer will families with disabled children or parents be allowed to go to the front of long lines.
One of the reasons for the change, a Disney spokeswoman told the Orange County Register, was to curtail "abuse of this system" by healthy families pretending that some of its members are ill or disabled.
In May, the New York Post reported that wealthy parents were hiring disabled "tour guides" to blend in with their families and enable them to go to the front of lines. As coldly cynical as this sounded, as snickeringly selfish, there was more: Websites serving families with disabled children featured message boards with infuriating tales of healthy people renting wheelchairs to avoid waiting in Disney theme-park lines.
Thus, Disney is initiating a new policy to take effect early next month. Families with disabled children or parents may apply for a variation of a current Disney program that instructs visitors to report to a ride during a specified window of time. But the front-of-the-line privileges extended to chronically ill or disabled boys and girls are over. And few people will be startled if the new passes feature photo IDs, to prevent them from being sold by scalpers to healthy visitors to the parks.
Don't blame Disney for this. The company's long-standing impulse to provide front-of-the-line consideration for customers with physical disabilities has been commendable. Yet, short of positioning a physician at the entrance to every ride to ascertain the legitimacy of a person's ailment, what was the company to do?
The fault lies directly with those parents who evidently think nothing of conniving their way to an unfair edge in the world, including even feigning that they or their children suffer disabilities.
Who is really being hurt if healthy people figure out a way to skip the lines? For starters, the children who genuinely are chronically ill or disabled, the children whose fevers and tremors are real. They may not have been given many breaks in their short time on earth, but Disney traditionally granted them one.
There are other people, though, who, in a more subtle manner, are hurt in the long term: the able-bodied children who have been shown by their parents that gaming the system, that faking disabilities, is what smart people do. That it's the clever way, the winner's way. Only suckers, no matter how healthy, wait in line. It's a lesson thatsadlywill stick.
Walt Disney, long ago, had the dream of building an enchanted place. He built it.
And then the people came. Which begat the current problem. The honor system, evidently, is officially obsolete.
The only surprise may be that it has taken this long. And what of those children who really do need their wheelchairs or leg braces? Those children whose fragile medical conditions make a day at a Disney park a rare and wonderful, but tenuous and wearying, occasion?
Their parents can say to them, truthfully:
The reason the rules have changed is that some other mothers and fathers told their children to pretend their lives are as hard as yours.
