What does it avail a man or woman if life is only conditionally possible? How does one live? What ideas about life promise advantage? These were the topics my friend William Peace and I addressed two days ago at Syracuse University—haltingly, perhaps imperfectly, but mindful that “disability-life” is precious, dignified, and in peril.
Why stop? Elder-life is in peril; impoverished life; unmarried women with children—lives are in free fall all around us.
The GOP lead congressional investigation into the Obamacare website is laughable. People die for lack of affordable health care. One would think to hear Republicans they’re engaged when it comes to guaranteeing a shot at life for the weakest. As a paratactic exercise, read Sheri Fink’s new book Five Days at Memorial for a succinct, journalistic narrative of how ordinary citizens are consigned to live or die in a nation with a failing medical system and a broken social contract.
My friend Bill Peace was once encouraged by a hospital administrator (a “hospitalist”) to consider, seriously, ending his life. Disability lives are undervalued, unseen because they’re a metaphor for weakness and economic failure. Seeing that the hospital wanted to “off him” Bill called upon his large, Catholic family to visit him at all hours of the day and night—a demonstration of his social value. He also demanded his bed chart note his Ph.D..
Lost in the television “talk” is the critical fact that millions in this country have been designated “death worthy” —and unlike fatuous old Charles Grassley, who warned credulous voters Obamacare would “unplug Grandma” the life and death prospects for our nation’s most vulnerable citizens have actually been decided. Elder life and disability life are not on the lists of the saved.
Planet of the Blind 