All day I’ve been trying to slip the tag of these blues–the baseball analogy seems right–the blues has the ball and I’m sliding slowly and painfully into his hard touch. It takes hours to slide.
When I got up today I was rounding third, fresh from a dream where I was lost in a far city, some place in China. People kept pointing to my face, my wandering, ineffective eyes–they’d point and laugh and no one would answer my questions.
I know it was my childhood and adolescence. Since the unconscious likes novelty it threw in some strange Asian people, but they were really just the principal and students of my high school who didn’t want me in the classroom–any classroom–the irritating blind kid. How they hated my very existence. And there was the track coach who wouldn’t let me run on his team because a blind kid was a liability. He and some of the students in his circle laughed at me, demanding I return the track suit. Laughed and pointed.
I have a disability. Some days I’m running in three worlds: the open field of my imagination (where I entertain optimism), the daily hurdles of American life (where I’m prevented from riding in a taxi because of my guide dog) and the city of deep memory (where I will always be a humiliated boy who simply wanted to fit in). All of the running is difficult, sub-aquatic, and slow, horribly slow.
When I read yesterday that Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa has decided not to seek reelection after forty years of public service I felt like weeping. I was sitting on an Amtrak train on my way home to Syracuse and somewhere around Poughkeepsie I found the article with my talking iPad. I felt just then a sense of deep and profound loss for Senator Harkin has often been the only friend of Americans with disabilities in the US senate. I do not feel I’m exaggerating here. While other senators have voted for measures designed to help people with disabilities no other man or woman on Capitol Hill has been so consistent, brave, undaunted and fierce on our behalf. No one.
Earlier today when the blues caught the ball, when I was turning the corner for home, fresh from a bad dream, I wrote on Facebook that its hard to imagine who might take Senator Harkin’s place, and pointed out that liberals and neo-liberals are no better when it comes to disability than many conservatives. You can’t count on democrats. I am, for all intents and purposes, rather terrified. People with disabilities are about to lose the best friend in politics they’ve ever had.
Running in three worlds. Slow motion.
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Planet of the Blind 