Month: March 2013

Stephen Drake writes over at Not Dead Yet of the cheer leading industry, now wildly out of control, rooting for disabled war veteran Tomas Young to end his life–framed with the martyrdom of political tragedy. Drake writes of lefty journalist Chris Hedges’ martyrology:

 

“Hedges seems to have a problem with distinguishing between fictional characters and real people. Tomas Young is a real person. Hector was a mythical character in a story about a dimly-remembered real-life Trojan War. Bonham was a plot device. It’s telling that when Hedges wants to talk about people who are used and discarded, he conjures up fictional characters. Tomas Young is not a fictional character, but a real person. And if and when he kills himself, his death won’t be a fictional death, but the real thing. And media folks like Hedges will have used and discarded Young just as surely as Bush and Cheney did.”

 

I am horrified by the de facto acceptance of a man’s suicide by the liberal media, which now includes Democracy Now. Apparently after a decade of nationally sanctioned human rights violations the death of a disabled veteran (who needn’t die) is AOK if by offing himself he creates a shiver of outrage at Bush and Cheney. This story is so profoundly corrupt I can’t find much with which to compare it, save for a handful of crime novels.

Blue in boyhood equals jazzy circles when old.

Once I was St. Sebastian, but Orphic birds all about.

Its the things we can’t make up that count.

Don’t knock on my door unless you’ve been around the farm at least once.

 

Riding the train: mile after mile of abandoned houses and automobile skeletons

And track-side warehouses pulling the twilight close.

 

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.

By Andrea Scarpino

 

I heard the crying
as soon as I entered the security line: London Heathrow, Monday, 7am. I turned
to follow the cries and finally found a little girl in an adjacent line
clutching her mother’s long hair as her mother bounced her in her arms. The
child, maybe one year old, was tiny, but she wailed and sobbed and breathed in
long gasps that seemed to rattle everyone in line. She was inconsolable; she
wouldn’t sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with her mother, wouldn’t drink from
her bottle, wouldn’t engage the string of toys her father kept pushing into her
hands.

 

I sent
compassionate thoughts to the family, tried to will her parents patience, tried
to ease the girl’s pain. Suddenly, two paramedics on bicycles arrived, another
man with a two-way radio, a uniformed airline representative. Someone had
reported an ill child, I overheard; the paramedics were worried the child was too
sick to fly. The mother shook her head: the girl wasn’t sick, just tired and
overwhelmed.

 

Even so, the
security response shifted into high gear. The rest of us wore our shoes through
the x-ray machine, but security insisted the entire family remove their shoes,
a member of the security team pulling the girl’s red sneakers from her feet as
she kicked and flung her body into her mother’s chest and stomach. Then two men
and her father wrenched her from her mother so her mother could walk through
the scanner alone.

 

The final
insult: security personnel insisted the father take a sip from each bottle of formula
carefully packed in plastic bags. Sip after sip with a cadre of security
standing in a circle watching. “We’ll just leave it,” I heard the father say,
but he pushed on, a grown man drinking his child’s formula, his child still
screaming, weeping, the mother’s desperation, now, that they would miss their
flight.

 

And I
thought, this child is the only sane person in the entire security line. Of
course she is terrified, of course she is screaming—nothing about what she is
witnessing makes any sense.  

 

I started
flying alone when I was 6 years old. A flight attendant was assigned to care
for me from the moment one parent left me on the plane until the moment another
one picked me up. I was given bags of toys on each flight: metal Delta pins,
coloring books and crayons, comic books about flying. I loved the magic of it,
how I dressed up, how someone always sneaked me extra snacks, how the pilots
let me peak into the cockpit.

 

I know we’re
all supposed to believe times have changed, the world has changed, we need
extra security measures to keep us safe. But watching security’s response to
this family, to this crying child, knowing another passenger in line had
reported them, seeing how little compassion they were shown—well, it makes me
sad for all of us. It makes me sad for the kind of world we’re allowing
ourselves to inhabit. 

 

 

This is a proposition about bodies, yours and mine,

Book in hand, the one about god–

 

Book in hand and look at all the blind ones

And the lame, and deaf ones–

 

Weren’t they in the ink?

Weren’t they the alchemy all along?

 

The electrolysis, how it sparks,

travels through dust, enters the tongue

 

All to say “us” and “hazard”

Without remorse.

 

We know the early angels were bent.

William Blake saw them, our true father.

 

I walk with my stick on roads of green joy.

 

Comedy, bring me a goat. I’m no stranger to goats. I once knew a goat named Romeo. He was the size of a Buick, covered with the hair of Enkidu and he stank like a New Jersey marsh reclamation. And yes, he was always hungry. In fact Romeo’s hunger lead his owner Mrs. D, a country widow who cleaned houses to swipe food from her employers. My mother was one of her “marks”. 

 

My mother was eccentric and solitary and a heavy drinker. She slept most of the day and Mrs. D would run the vacuum ever so lightly, dust a lone room and then clean out the refrigerator, stuffing her oversized satchel with hams, onions, lettuces, cheeses, celery, anything that struck her fancy–which was Romeo’s fancy, for once, home for a visit, I overheard Mrs. D talking to herself at the wide open fridge, saying: “Oh, Romeo will love that. Oh, oh, oh, won’t Romeo love this!” She was actually cackling. And into the big bag went a whole baked chicken. I approached. Said: “Who is Romeo?” The question came from liberal conscience. I reckoned there might be a Mr. D who perhaps was a wounded veteran of the Korean War, or maybe he wore medical stockings owing to phlebitis–and certainly I wasn’t going to rat out basic humanitarian thievery if I could help it. Besides, my mother tended not to notice the disappearance of material things, even baked chickens. “Romeo?” she said, “Why Romeo is my goat!” “Your goat?” I repeated. “Oh yes, he’s a big one too!” More cackling. And into the satchel went a large head of lettuce and some grapefruits. 

 

I asked Mrs. D if she’d introduce me to Romeo and she did. She stood at the edge of a broad pasture and with her cotton house dress billowing, she called to her beloved with high and plaintive tones, a sound known to our ancestors on the steppes of Central Asia–a song to waken the brute spirit–and over a hillock long un-mowed rose a creature so large and hairy I thought of Hemingway’s “Green Hills of Africa”. “Jesus,” I said, “that’s a big fucking goat!” “Oh yes,” said Mrs. D, who seemed unoffended by my expletive, for she added, “Oh yes, Romeo’s a bruiser!” 

 

How do you describe the smell of a goat? One thinks of Hell, of sulphur and desiccation, but that doesn’t really cover it. Goats smell of shit and testosterone and rotting cabbages. I wished for a kerosene soaked rag. But Mrs. D was oblivious and cackling again, tossing grapefruits and chicken legs over the fence and Romeo caught his morsels straight out of the air and I watched as my mother’s groceries disappeared down his gullet. “Isn’t he a fine specimen?” she asked. I agreed. And I told Mrs. D to leave a little food at home for my mother because one should share the wealth, as it were. And she cackled. 

 

I remembered an ancient Scottish superstition that called for a he-goat to be hanged from a ship’s mast as it would bring a good wind. I suspect the sailors couldn’t smell. There is no good wind with a goat. In the olden days it was said a goat was good on a farm, as its stink kept off diseases. I know naught of these things. But I saw Romeo. He was a doctor of something. Of this I remain certain. 

Over the past decade stories epitomizing the intersections of disability studies and bioethics have been at the center of international news. From the recent euthanizing of blind-deaf twins in Belgium to the story of Tomas Young a paralyzed veteran of the Iraq War who has decided to end his life, narratives of physician assisted suicide and disability are growing in frequency.

 

Contrasting and disparate narratives highlight efforts to modify people with disabilities, most notably a procedure called “growth attenuation” in which children with intellectual disabilities are rendered forever small. Genetic counseling suggests it is advisable to abort children with Down Syndrome or even less dramatic disabilities such as blindness.

 

One can scarcely imagine what Helen Keller’s response might have been to the sanctioned euthanasia of the blind-deaf Belgian twins, or the argument that disabled little girls should be rendered forever small, largely for the sake of their parents’ convenience. I think she would be demanding air time on our feckless televisions to argue for human dignity and to remind viewers we are not our disabilities but indeed are creatures more mysterious and precious than casual glimpses lead many to suppose.

 

Advocates Accuse Corrections Department Of Mistreating Prisoners With Mental Illness
(Associated Press)
March 14, 2013

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] Hundreds of mentally-ill inmates in Pennsylvania languish for months and even years in isolated cells, according to a class-action lawsuit filed Monday that says the “Dickensian” practice only exacerbates their condition.

The federal lawsuit accuses state prison officials of punishing the mentally ill for head-banging, hallucinations and other psychotic behaviors instead of getting them needed medical care.

About one-third of the 2,400 inmates kept in restricted custody across the state suffer from serious mental-health problems, according to the suit. They spend 23 hours a day in small, windowless cells, and have little contact with other human beings.

A few have been held in solitary for more than a decade as punishment for various infractions, leading some to attempt suicide, advocates said.

“They don’t know what time it is, or what day it is. They have no feedback loop with reality,” said Robert W. Meek, a lead attorney with the Disability Rights Network of Pennsylvania, which filed the suit in Harrisburg against the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

Entire article:
Class-action lawsuit: Pennsylvania’s mentally ill inmates stuck in isolation
http://tinyurl.com/ide0314132a
Related:
Disability rights group sues over ‘cruel and unusual’ treatment of mentally ill state prison inmates (Patriot-News)
http://tinyurl.com/ide0314132b
Advocates sue PA Dept. of Corrections for treatment of mentally ill prisoners (Examiner)
http://tinyurl.com/ide0314132c