Back in 1998 I was offered the job of Commissioner of the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities in New York City. I turned it down. I chose to return to teaching and went to Ohio State. Now I’m at Syracuse University and I travel to Manhattan frequently.
Lately I’ve seen clear evidence that the city of New York is going backwards where disability consciousness is concerned. I have encountered numerous construction sites where sidewalks are blocked off and the feeble detours are entirely inaccessible for wheelchairs, dangerous for blind people, and when you question the man in charge he acts clueless. Clueless is not an acceptable social policy but it’s what’s now passing routinely in NYC for disability engagement and awareness. Not long ago I was denied entrance to an upscale restaurant owned by the Trump conglomerate. The doorman said he knew “all about blindness,” why by jinkies, “I had a blind aunt”–and he wouldn’t let me in because I had a guide dog.
Admittedly these are anecdotal representations of my thesis that things are in decline in New York. But Mayor Bloomberg has been openly contemptuous of the efforts by wheelchair users who have been advocating for an accessible taxi cab fleet. He actually said:
“If you’re in a wheelchair, it’s really hard to go out in the street and hail down a cab and get the cab to pull over and get into it.”
The logic behind this assertion seems to work like this: It’s really hard to be disabled, so stay at home.
Stay at home is also not an acceptable social policy.
An old friend of mine likes to say that “fish stinks from the head” –a phrase I like and yes, sometimes fish stinks all over. Right now I’d say that the city of New York is in general disability decline because the mayor has made it acceptable to sneer. Where disability and dignity are concerned he’s the sneerer in chief.
Good or evil, success or failure rest in our hands.
New York is the gateway to this nation for culture and business–oh, it’s so hard for the wheelchair people to have culture and business, really they should just stay home, eh?
Translation: let’s just make sure they stay home. Let’s continue to make it next to impossible for them to get anywhere.
Planet of the Blind 