A Minority of One : John Hockenberry’s career--and now his book--challenge assumptions about rights, identity and individualism : MOVING VIOLATIONS: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence, <i> By John Hockenberry (Hyperion: $24.95; 371 pp.)</i>

Some things we don’t ask. Like of the paraplegic in his wheelchair: How’s your sex life?

John Hockenberry’s is. . . . No, no. Let him tell you.

A broadcast journalist formerly with NPR and now with ABC, Hockenberry wrote this travelogue, autobiography, confessional, cathartic and reproof after spending exactly half of his 38 years as a T-5 paraplegic, numb from mid-chest down, a “crip,” sitting in a wheelchair.

But hardly sitting still.

Hockenberry is a peripatetic paraplegic. He is an achiever. As journalist, he is both teacher and student, more curious than certain.

He is also obsessive, reflective, fatalistic, stubborn and unpredictable. He likes himself, so he can laugh at himself. He can flare into a fury and smash his fist through a taxi window. In other words, Hockenberry is quite ordinary.

Fate, however, has dealt him an extreme hand, so his determination approaches the extraordinary. In these days of group identity, Hockenberry tells an intimate, personal story about a minority group for which each of us remains fully eligible.

In “Moving Violations,” he is less a news correspondent writing what he witnessed than a man with his gun-sights on society’s still-rigid rule: Don’t dwell on your differences if you’re trying to make it along with everyone else.

“To call attention to the wheelchair now by writing about it violates that rule. My mind and soul fight any effort to comment or complain,” he writes.

That is on Page 3. For the next 368 pages, Hockenberry overcomes his reservations.

While the world’s big events swirl around him--Somalia, the Gulf War, Mount St. Helens, Mideast uprisings--we roll, clatter and huff our way along with him in the sitting position. We endure the “feeling” of numbness through half our body; lactic acid builds up in our biceps. We learn to hate stairs but refuse to let them win. We ponder the pros and cons of armrests on wheelchairs. We blaze down a sidewalk at rush hour, dodging briefcases at eye level. (Now there’s a secret euphoria.)

We relive the instant Hockenberry’s life changed, and the bewildering days after. “The most powerful sensation I have ever felt is of no sensation at all,” Hockenberry writes.

We wander, fall in love, fall out of love, sift through the lives of our ancestors, worry about our careers and face our demons. Imagine the long-distance call to an editor you’ve never met and who knows nothing of your disability: You missed deadline because you could not hoist yourself into the only phone booth for miles. Imagine the dread of wetting your pants. Or the satisfaction of presenting a wounded Palestinian his first modern wheelchair.

Like one of those long NPR feature stories, “Moving Violations” rambles through some dense underbrush of detail. But Hockenberry does not brood--at least any more than one would tolerate in a newly met acquaintance. He is a man in motion with an eye for the revealing, and for the absurd.

Both his ex-wife and his father say he searches out places where he is sure to find obstacles. Hockenberry seems to regard himself less the searcher than a guy on a wildly random ride, trying to make coherent that which is not logical.

This is a story about feeling different as well as being different in America. And that drives us deep into the complex clockwork of 1990s culture.

We can rejoice in Hockenberry’s example of social progress. In the 1930s, grandfather Tom Hockenberry was rejected for simple membership in the Ohio Masons because he had lost one arm. Now, grandson John roams the world’s tough terrain in the most public of professions in a wheelchair.

A one-time food stamp recipient and nursing home aide, Hockenberry began his broadcast career at a small, radical public radio station in Oregon. He moved on to National Public Radio as a newscaster and reporter before becoming a correspondent for ABC News.

Achievement, however, isn’t everything. A drink of water satisfies the thirsty man. Then it awakens his hunger.

To Hockenberry, America’s long march toward social justice--its court decrees and ballyhooed legislation--has produced the symbols of change but not the spirit for change. The new Americans With Disabilities Act, designed to make public facilities accessible to all, is merely an abstract idea to many. Except those trying to get in, out or around in their daily lives.

Hockenberry’s wheelchair rolls on bicycle wheels. But there is a step in front of the door to his bicycle shop. The owner sees no need to remove it, assuring Hockenberry the law is “just for the new buildings.”

Hockenberry contemplates three choices: He can sue. He can find a new shop farther away. Or he can come back with a sledgehammer. “Which one is a lost cause?”

“A system designed to bring people together has done much to drive them apart,” Hockenberry writes about his country.

Still, can the “system” bear all the blame? Does it really explain how differences keep us apart? At a New Hampshire winter sports carnival for the disabled, Hockenberry rolls up to the dinner table. “The blind sat with the blind. The paraplegic wheelchairs sat with the paraplegic wheelchairs. Quadriplegics with other quads. Amputees with amputees--no leg and arm combinations. It was leg to leg, arm to arm, crutch to crutch, prosthesis to prosthesis, like a Balkan convention of the war wounded,” he writes.

Perhaps without intentional irony, Hockenberry finds the Middle East “easier in so many ways” for a disabled correspondent. “In America, access is always about architecture and never about human beings. Among Israelis and Palestinians, access was rarely about anything but people.”

Too bad their humanity cannot resolve those other differences, eh John? This is not to belittle Hockenberry. He not only accepts his contradictions but relishes them, and how many of us can say that? Hockenberry wants to be understood, to bridge the gap between us. And he wants to be left alone.

“I’m a guy in a chair, crip for life. Everything you think about me is right. Everything you think is wrong.” For this reason, above all, Hockenberry’s book lingers in the mind: Jostling along in his wheelchair we discover something of ourselves.