Talk to Me When You've Got a Plan

I have been thinking hard for over fifteen years about the state of people with disabilities when it comes to the issue of employment. I am of course not alone in this obsession and yes I think its fair to call it that. One way to think about an obsession is to imagine that your world is shaped by the things that occupy its edges. The edge of the world was Christopher Columbus’ obsession; the white whale was Ahab’s–both things were at the corner of the map if you will. For me the daily reminder that people with disabilities are disproportionately unemployed is as terrible as Melville’s whale. And like Ahab my inability to forget the thing has to do with a powerful personal experience. I call it “the plastic lemon” story.

I was a 35 year old unemployed college professor living in Ithaca, New York. I called the appropriate agencies and one fine day a gentleman from the New York State Commission for the Blind came to visit me to talk about job training programs for the blind and visually impaired. He was a good man. He was a really good man. And yet when confronted with my CV and my work experience he was forced to conclude that the way forward for me would be steep if not impossible. He suggested that I make an appointment at a nearby sheltered workshop for people with disabilities–a place where among other things they were busy manufacturing plastic lemons.

Its hard for me to say what kept me from quitting. I think my determination to forge ahead with my hopes had everything to do with the support of good friends, the good luck of having had an excellent education, and a curious desire to write and keep writing. Ultimately even if you don’t have a job you can make productive things happen if you are in love with an art form. And so I bided my time and wrote and as they say in the vernacularI “kept my powder dry”.

So I set out on the ocean of possibilities  and I didn’t let the unknown clobber my psyche. I’d say this is an American story. Its a pull yourself up by your bootstraps narrative. But the difference between what happened to me as a consequence of having some writing ability and some publishing luck and the serious matter of finding employment has very little to do with my abilities. This is an American no-no. We’re not supposed to say that we are the beneficiaries of extrinsic factors that the Romans would have called auguries. We are self made men and women. And of course this is all nonsense. .

Persistence and talents are all to the good but one has to have luck. Someone has to offer you a job. Someone has to say that your capacities and strengths are going to be helpful on a team. Someone has to believe that your evident disability is very clearly a kind of epistemology or way of knowing that affords you some important qualities of mind–things like patience, imagination, empathy for others–those things we all hope we can demonstrate when called upon, especially to our own children.

It is clear to me that more employers in all sectors of our society need to help people with disabilities with that “lucky break” and in a time when we’re talking about national renewal this is the moment to reaffirm this goal.

It is clear to me that a new series of national conversations  has to happen. These roundtables need to invite new people along with the folks who have championed this cause for so long. In effect we need an Aspen Institute  or Renaissance Retreat that brings together those from industry, government,education, social services,and dozens    of other critical areas to imagine collectively how this century, this 21st century can be different from the last one. The last one was a hangover from the 19th century, the century that invented the word disability and tied it to the notion of helplessness and unemployment.

You can train a person how to use raille or a special computer but you can’t give them a job. Only the people in the complex worlds  of employment can offer human beings a place on the team. We know they won’t do this in larger numbers if they have a 19th century play book.

S.K.

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto