I can’t tell you how to roll your wheelchair. Can’t even tell you how to be blind. Certainly haven’t a clue about inspiring people. But I know two things for sure: sequestration is harming the elderly and people with disabilities and the negotiations underway in DC are going to do more harm because the Obama administration has firmly put medicare and medicaid on the table for serious cutting. These are bad times for our nation’s most vulnerable citizens.
On the flip side I know a blind man who climbs mountains with his guide dog. People love this story. It gets good media. Now I’m starting to wonder if blind people should scale the Washington Monument. What will it take to awaken the public to the plight of the needy? We spend more time lamenting the fates of people on stalled cruise ships or worrying about Lindsey Lohan’s days in court than the prospect of people in need being thrown to the wolves.
One wonders if the eugenics movement has come around again–or if it never left. The easy and collective shoulder shrugging when news arrives about the euthanizing of blind-deaf twins in Belgium tells a frightening cultural story: we’re weary of “those people” and want to send them packing and if they want to send themselves packing so much the better. Is that where we are? Oh dear.
A story by Michelle Diament over at Disability Scoop relates how physicians’ offices in the United States remain inaccessible to patients with disabilities some two decades after the passage of the ADA. Talk about a cultural divide. If you can afford health care you still can’t get it.
Meanwhile a story at the Brooklyn Eagle highlights a lawsuit being filed by people with disabilities against the City of New York. During Hurricane Irene many pwds discovered inaccessible shelters.
We have to fight back both in cultural terms and in the pragmatics of living dignified lives.
Planet of the Blind 