I am ending 2008 with what the poet Norman Dubie has called "the green sickness of middle life" as I am ever mindful that the poor and people with disabilities and the elderly are far ahead of most Americans when it comes to suffering in our collapsed economy. The predations of nursing homes, and of state run institutions, half way houses, and schools for the mentally challenged are widely reported in the nation’s news although these stories tend to get little play in the national television newscasts. Instead we hear about the Illinois Governor’s corruption scandal as if petty thievery was something new to the political life of our nation. Meanwhile off camera the poor and defenseless are being herded into the streets or worse, they’re being placed in unconscionable institutions where the employees are without education and all too often without even the rudiments of compassion. The abandonment of our nation’s most defenseless citizens began in the Reagan administration and the problems have never been resolved insofar as the ruling classes have resisted national health care.
And so I am gloomy as the year ends. I see institutions of higher education all across this country that have still failed to adopt the minimum standards of disability compliance, their administrators imagining that disability isn’t really an intellectual matter but simply a question of plumbing in some building—and certainly such administrators happily imagine that people with disabilities are not a part of the cultural conversations of a university or college curriculum or diversity plan.
I’ve seen how my friend Howard has struggled to get cable television to imagine a channel that could be devoted to the real lives of over 54 million Americans with disabilities. Howard has found broad and authentic enthusiasm from disability rights activists, writers, scholars, journalists, and the arts community but no substantive interest from people who could invest in such an enterprise. When we have cable TV channels devoted to poker playing for god’s sake I think reluctantly that the issue is disability itself. America still isn’t ready to conceive of disability as a real part of daily life. We’re still hooked on sappy television about "overcoming" a disability by climbing a mountain or the sweet forbearance of contemporary Tiny Times who remind us all of our god given good luck. Real disability is of course far different and programming about people who live and work and play while managing their disabilities A cable channel devoted to real disabilities would of course do the whole country a lot of good. But we’re not ready for real people on TV unless they’re pitted against one another in a sorority house or fighting over the broiled tarantula legs on a desert island.
I remain optimistic because President-elect Obama is going to work like hell to get something like health care up and running. I remain optimistic because people with disabilities are not going to go away and their allies are diverse and strong and poised to make a real difference in the years ahead.
Still I believe that the smug media compartmentalization of stories about people with disabilities is a very sad contemporary reality and one that contributes to the peculiarly American Puritanical tradition that somehow those in need must deserve it. I’m experiencing a great deal of schadenfreude these days as I watch the corporate classes lining up for their bailouts—the very classes of our citizenry that have argued against programs to help the most destitute.
I think as the year ends that a good rule of thumb is to ask when debating the merits of our public officials or of those who would like to become the same "What have you done for the poor?" In this paradigmatic area Caroline Kennedy beats her rivals for the New York senate seat vacated by Hilary Clinton hands down.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 