Proposal Argument Outline

1. Intro
1. Raise your hand if you've ever broken a bone before. Now keep it raised if that break prevented you from getting to places as easily as you could before. For example, you broke your leg, and now you have to use the elevators and ramps everywhere. Cool, you're the people who have even the vaguest idea of what it's like to have a disability.
2. It's not fun, right? And it gets very difficult when the elevators and ramps aren't available. Unfortunately, for many, this is a struggle they experience every day! Not every place has those kinds of resources, and the University of Iowa is no exception. That needs to change.
2. Surely it isn't that important?
1. I know, many of you think that this isn't your problem to deal with. It doesn't affect you personally, so why should you care? Besides, "real life" isn't so pleasant anyway, so there's no point in babying them. Well, you're wrong, and also, that kind of thinking is a major part of the problem.
2. You should care because you should, theoretically, have some form of basic empathy or sympathy, learned or inherent. For example, I'm autistic and don't naturally feel empathy, but I learned it, and I can at least sympathize with others in pain. You should be able to care about the people around you and not just yourself, and we should all be working together to make this world less cruel.
3. Contrary to popular belief, this is not a dog-eat-dog world, and the only reason humans have been able to survive and develop as much as we have is because we're insanely social animals who look out for each other, including and especially those who have a harder time surviving.
3. Why this absolutely is important
1. In this specific case, the lack of accessibility is especially harmful to those who need it. Why are we going to the University of Iowa? I assume it's because we all want an education. After all, in this economy, having a degree is the only way you have even the smallest chance of working your way up in the world. How are you supposed to get that opportunity if you can't even get to your classes?
2. Raise your hand if you know where the elevator is in this building. With that in mind, imagine you just broke your leg and you have to hobble down the stairs to get to this class. Painful, dangerous, not fun, right? Now imagine that you have a chronic illness that prevents the use of your legs, and you're in a wheelchair. Can you make it to this class? Yes, but only because there's a very obvious lift at the back entrance. Can you make it to the third floor for your next class? I sure hope so; otherwise, you're going to suffer even more.
3. How many of you live in either Currier or Stanley Hall? Do you know how to access the ramp to the Currier multipurpose room? For those of you who don't know, it's a locked ramp that you can only access with a very specific key. I have a friend who needed to use it and asked the front desk for the key, but the people at the desk didn't even know what my friend was talking about. It took over a day for them to get a simple, single key for a ramp so that they didn't hurt themself going down the stairs.
4. Now for the bionic bus. First things first, the university has to determine whether or not someone is disabled enough to use this service. If you don't qualify fully, you're restricted to a pre-planned route only, and if you miss this bus, that's it. There's no waiting for five minutes for another bionic bus like there is for the regular cambus.
5. In short, the system is broken, and it needs to be fixed.
4. So what do we do to fix that?
1. The locations of elevators, lifts, and ramps should all be made expressly clear in every building. That can easily be changed with something as simple as signs. It's not an expensive change at all! After all, every multi-story building on campus should have an elevator anyway.
2. For locked accessibility aids such as ramps, the answer is even simpler: don't lock the ramps, or at least have the key readily available at all times. This isn't that difficult, people.
3. What is difficult is determining the solution to the bionic bus problem. Ideally, more bionic busses should be added to the existing route, with the cost of those simply being added to the students' tuitions in the same way that the cambusses are paid for.
5. Conclusion
1. This may be a problem, but it's not as difficult to solve as many seem to believe. By simply acknowledging that it's a problem, it becomes much easier to fix the existing issues and create a safer, kinder world for everyone to live in.