Quick, Say Something Funny

I was down today, and therefore not an appealing fellow. I snarled on Facebook, or, as a friend from Texas has been known to put it: “I pissed in the shrimp dip.” 

The pending Supreme Court defenestration of the Civil Rights Voting Act of 1964 seems unassailable if you want to pretend you’re a psychic. The rightward justices hate government intervention in the affairs of the states and they spent the entire 2000’s winnowing the Americans with Disabilities Act until it was almost “a goner”–only the concerted and bi-partisan reaction of Congress through the adoption of the ADA Restoration Act has saved the day. And perhaps after 7 years of exhausting political retrenchment we will again reaffirm the power of the national government to enforce voting rights on the red states–but forgive me as tonight I see the whole rotten trajectory of disenfranchisement and the long, slow, agonized legislative effort to reaffirm one of the finest federal laws ever to grace our fair land. 

So I was gloomy about this today. And angry about the pending cuts to special education and disability services that will accompany the sequestration. 

Finally, I’m in the woods writing a book and feeling the internal scars of disability, for even though I’m writing about guide dogs and how marvelous they are, I am also by turns writing about the provisional and hard world of the visually impaired. 

Tonight I had to ask a fellow artist to stop petting my guide dog “in harness” and she gave me a look that said, “You’re a schmuck.” So I skipped dinner. 

Yep. I’m not an appealing fellow. But in my wild dream of the future, no one has to beg to vote, or explain their difference in order to be in the village square. 

I should say something funny. Students at the University of London once stole Jeremy Bentham’s head. 

Author: stevekuusisto

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