A friend asked me today what I’m taking satisfaction from–the context was disability work–and I said that the ADA Restoration Act has been a good sign. Then she asked what still bothers me and I said that there are daily stories of abuses being perpetrated against people with disabilities at schools and residential facilities in these United States and that these stories are haunting and outrageous.
I stopped then. I was about to go on and talk about the failure of our nation’s large media to pick up these stories of disability abuse. Our national airwaves have been given over to ideological palaver and histrionics and the maltreatment of our nation’s elderly or the mentally ill or of school kids with learning disabilities is never and I mean never the topic of conversation or even simply disclosed.
The failure of our news engines to talk about real lives and the consequent agonies of a broken health care system leads inexorably to the business of abstraction. Just as Americans have been able to rationalize the use of torture by saying we don’t really water board people we imagine that these abuses of the elderly or of the mentally ill are somehow happening to distant people, people not of our own kind, not of our circle, our neighborhood, in other words its not in my department.
I have been dismayed over the past two decades as I’ve watched people in the United States talk with ever increasing allegiance about Christian values while the nation has simultaneously veered further and further away from the ideals of equal opportunity in public education, in health care, in basic matters of human dignity.
There is, it seems, a rampant, smug, and workaday hypocrisy that’s greasing our nation’s wheels. This ain’t news for readers of literature. We make novels out of this and we talk about such matters in English classes. Theodore Dreisser or Flannery O’Conner are as relevant today as they were when their works were brand new.
What’s new is the increasing American tolerance for human suffering–a new kind of imagination if you will wherein the maltreatment of people with disabilities is overlooked, not because Americans think this is okay, but because talking about this is really a matter of widening the discussion about our nation’s health care system and its shameful inequalities. On the day that President Obama unveiled his budget for the next year, NBC’s Today show opened its morning broadcast with a packaged question: “Is the President Taking on Too Much? Viewers were treated to the sight of Jack Welsh, the former and forever scion of General Electric which owns NBC and he opined that the president shouldn’t be doing all these ambitious things at once.
Translation: don’t mess with health care. But this opinion piece on the Today show was, for me, coincidental with the news that the mentally ill are being abused in state after state. Who can hold his or her head up proudly or maintain level eye contact with real Christians while knowing what a shameful state of affairs is truly being perpetrated against our most defenseless citizens?
John Kennedy said we should ask ourselves what we can do for our country and to this I add we ought to hold in our minds the golden rule. Would you want bad health care for your own children? I doubt it. Would you want to turn abuse of your neighbor’s children into an abstraction? This latter question is the most dangerous. Maybe we need more Theodore Dreisser after all?
S.k.
Planet of the Blind 