February 2013 – Page 2 – Planet of the Blind

From the Outskirts

The meadow before me is a transitional place, insert Latin phrase.

Under the frozen field is a begging bowl, insert Greek proto-legality.

It’s growing hard to see, nearly dark, time for Russian.

From far off, a hum of traffic on the highway, Portuguese.

Drinking coffee, hearing my heart, install algebra.

Things I’ve lived through, eighth notes, Finno-ugrian jazz,

Bardo-Tibetan Reggae, yes, yes, insert Tibetan Bob Marley here…

What Is About to Happen to the Crippled Kids

My friend and colleague Wendy Harbour at Syracuse University sent me the following this morning:

A Washington Post breakdown of the sequestration’s state-by-state effects on children with disabilities. For example, New York state is expected to lose $36 million and cut 440 special education staff, while losing an additional $42.7 million and 590 teaching staff for K-12.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/sequestration-state-impact/?hpid=z2

Some years ago I stood up at a school board meeting in tony little Iowa City, Iowa, for the district had decided to simply eliminate their special ed teachers. Why not? Disposable people, the ones with needs. If you don’t think that Social Darwinism is alive and well in these United States you ought to have your head examined. Silly to say so. If someone is so “protected” from the world of children with illnesses, disabilities–indeed, from the terrible provincial nature of merely belonging in the public sphere–then you must by definition be profoundly wealthy. And in turn you must believe that the rest of the nation should be grateful just to have some scraps of bread.

What an appalling nation we’ve become. What a smug, corrupt, venal, greedy, decadent bunch of shits are now in Washington. Tears blind me some days. Irony. I’m already blind. Accordingly I know what it was like to be a child with a disability in public schools. I have a great idea! Let’s make it worse so we can give the wealthiest people enough kickback tax relief to buy a new Mercedes or Rolex watches for their dogs.

Kalevala

Wrought from iron

four sided word–

mill

forest

bird

boat

a thing

one word

boat-forest-bird-mill

how else

to tell it?

Anorexia

–at 16

There was a doctor who asked if my latch key string

was a fetish. (I’d lost that key, falling, so suicidal

I was a bird.) 98 pounds, hips like ears,

maybe you know the story–

in hospital, a Russian man wept in bed,

having no English, one night, showed me his scars.

I saw hunger was Judas‘ silver–so clean

and short-lived. Starting to read:

Mid-Autumn full moon, the luminous night

Is like a boundless ocean. A wild

Wind blows down the empty birds’ nests

And makes a sound like the waves of the sea

In the branches of the lonely trees.

Rexroth, old Chinese, a deathless root system

of poems–soft tyrannies of song–I was empty already

of everything else.

The History of Wheels. and Our Friend Liat Ben-Mose

Disability Rights And The Interational Symbol Of Accessibility
(Huffington Post)
February 22, 2013

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily] Justin J.W. Powell and Liat Ben-Moshe have written a great short history of the icon signifying accessibility for people who use wheelchairs for the magazine Stimulus Respond. The story, they argue, is one of “exclusion to inclusion.”

For most of American history, they begin, there was no icon at all. This is because people in wheelchairs were largely excluded from public life. There were no efforts to ensure accessibility, so no signs of accessibility were needed.

In the late ’60s, however, Rehabilitation International partnered with the United Nations and the International Standards Organisation to sponsor an international competition for an icon. The winner, a Danish design student named Susanne Koefoed, had submitted the icon on the left. In committee, they noted that Koefoed’s design erased the person in the wheelchair. They added a head, creating what people around the world recognize as a symbol of accessibility.

The symbol is still evolving.

Entire article:
Disability Rights and the Interational Symbol of Accessibility
http://tinyurl.com/ide0222136

At Last, Justice in Massachusetts Viz Judge Rotenberg Center

State To Clamp Down On Skin Shocks At Judge Rotenberg Center
(s.e. smith/Care2)
February 22, 2013

CANTON, MASSACHUSETTS– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] Big, and fantastic, news out of Massachusetts, where education officials, State Attorney General Margaret Coakley, and others are making a move to regulate the notorious Judge Rotenberg Center more closely, reacting to public outcry over the school’s controversial use of shock “treatment” on disabled students. This decision was made in part because of people like you, almost 12,000 of whom signed a petition here to demand closure of the Judge Rotenberg Center.

While regulation isn’t closure, it’s the first step in a closer investigation of the school and one that will lead to safer conditions for students — and, possibly, an eventual decision to shut the school down if it doesn’t meet standards and provide students with the best possible learning environment.

What, exactly, are officials doing here?

Coakley filed a motion last week to vacate a court order that has allowed the Judge Rotenberg Center to stand outside regulatory scrutiny since 1987. Fun fact: the school was renamed from the Behavioral Research Institute to the Judge Rotenberg Center in the 1990s for the very judge who limited government authority over the school with that court order in response to attempts to shut it down in the late 1980s. Under the court order, the school’s questionable educational practices were allowed to continue, and the state agencies who normally oversee facilities like the Judge Rotenberg Center had their hands tied.

Entire article:
Success! MA to Clamp Down on Shock Therapy in School
http://tinyurl.com/ide0222131a
Related:
Patrick fights Rotenberg shock therapy decree (Boston Globe)
http://tinyurl.com/ide0222131b
Judge Rotenberg Center — Facility Uses Electric Shock To Change Behavior (Inclusion Daily Express Archives)
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/institutions/ma/jrc.htm

Writing Prompt, Or, Against Romanticism

Look at the bookcase. Strange lives all over.

Each writer “had” or “has” a ghetto inside.

Books say its alright to grieve or fall down in the street

or seek love without talent. What a mystery!

How do you evolve from being a miraculous infant

to become Raskolnikov–where are the baby pictures?

You see? It’s the middle of the life that counts. Start there.

Dog Poem

She and I look into each other. She doesn’t understand it, my sorrow,

my “orphan”–a tyranny of school or church,

a paradox enlarging silence. After dark

we go searching the ideal life, two tramps

in mud time and she probes among stones,

scenting nails, buried spoons, staves and dishes,

late winter articles of shadow

for her nose is the hypnosis of the past.

Don’t you know she says, you can join our life?

To her all things are true, present, clear, so very clear.

Guard Duty

I have a secret tucked in the hippocampus, its handwriting like action paint, you know? There’s a protection racket, women with pitch forks, children who’ve been dragged into war, their fathers dead, the whole ball of fire. All the sub-rosa people want transfusions or gin. Food. Recipes from Atlantis. Anything.

The Cold War. I walk around balancing the tea cup, little plates of artful strawberries–a reception, the American Embassy, 1982, Reagan howling about winnable Nuclear War, Mercedes and BMW’s glittering in the underground garage, that smug, pink, Mormon Ambassador who thinks the world is just a mosaic, nothing more, his eyes always darting to see who is next.