CRITICAL THINKING
RUNNING A CAMPAIGN
Mullins’ influence helped change the way we think about disabilities, body image and beauty. In 1998, she signed a contract to become the face of L’Oréal Paris, the largest cosmetics company in the world. (Photo by Kenneth Willardt, L’Oréal)
“You don’t forget those.” (Full disclosure: Te author’s daughter was among those graduating.)
Her message to the grads was that they should embrace what many would call shortcomings. “I’d like you to remember that naiveté, curiosity and daydreaming are tools for building a better life, and you should be reaching into your toolbox for them often,” she told them.
PAVING THE WAY Curiosity and daydreaming sparked her imagination, she told Army AL&T, along with pop culture. “Stan Winston built the Terminator. It has an articulated ankle and knee, and I was seeing it. I was seeing these things happening in pop culture that just felt like, ‘Why isn’t that being used for people who need to have legs built, or arms?’
“Tere’s been an extraordinary evolution in the last two decades in the field of prosthetics, not least because of … the research
dollars for all of our veterans of the wars of the last decades that have come back with changed bodies.” Nearly all of the Soldiers were familiar with video and computer games, she noted. “So the idea of having an avatar, the idea of imagining yourself as another being moving through a world, was a muscle they had been flex- ing their whole life. Tey never stopped it. … I think veterans from Afghanistan, Iraq, the Persian Gulf War, they were very adaptable to their new bodies. You see people absolutely claiming their changed body; they can remain athletic and they also assert their creative power to make their prostheses the aesthetic repre- sentation of what they want their leg or their arm to look like.
“I see that with kids, when you meet 5-year-olds who, for what- ever reason, become an amputee. I met this girl at South by Southwest, and she created an arm that had a glitter rocket mech- anism. It had this internal slingshot, and she could kind of raise her arm toward the sky and pull this little lever mechanism, and glitter would come flying out. It made her the belle of the ball! She was 6 or 7 when she came up with this.”
https://asc.ar my.mil
135
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172
