On Teaching with my Friend John Robinson

First, check out https://www.ourability.com/ a consultancy called “Our Ability”–one of the premier platforms for connecting the disabled with companies looking to hire. John Robinson uses AI in the service of this and has been doing it for several years.

John and I are team teaching a class at Syracuse University which focuses on the history of disability and its accommodations. There is no book on the history of accommodations which is truly surprising and we’ve begun thinking about writing one. Meanwhile, as we teach, day by day, the advances in disability rights and inclusion of the disabled in society are being wiped out. On the one hand we talk about people like Judy Heumann , Jim LeBrecht and Ron Kovic, and on the other we have to address the deliberate efforts by the current administration to eliminate disability rights. Talk about re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic!

The course is being offered through the university’s program in health humanities. 

John’s story and mine are not far distant. We’ve both been unemployed and owing to our respective disabilities, we’ve been told we’ll never find a job. In my memoir “Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey” I recount how a blindness rehab counselor told me I could maybe find work in a nearby factory that manufactured plastic lemons. I had a grad degree. I’d been a teacher. John graduated from Syracuse having studied in the Newhouse School of Public Communications and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, two world class academic programs. He struggled for years to find employment. In my case it was “who thinks a blind person can do anything?” In John’s it was “how can a person without full arms and legs even be in public much less in the work force?”

What does it mean to be teaching about disability history in just this moment?

The answer lies in part with optimism. Not the Pollyanna stuff. The striving kind.

Let’s celebrate what for lack of a better term one might call the optimistic imagination as practiced by cripples.

I’m in mind of G.K. Chesterton’s assessment of Dickens, that he was: “delighted at the same moment that he was desperate. The two opposite things existed in him simultaneously, and each in its full strength. His soul was not a mixed colour like grey and purple, caused by no component colour being quite itself. His soul was like a shot silk of black and crimson, a shot silk of misery and joy.”

One must be risible in the boot black factory. (Dickens-Chaplin.) Its likely a tee shirt slogan: we hope in misery. As for the poetic imagination printed pages are often sad even when they propose optimism and no honest writer can ignore it. What did J.P. Morgan’s library smell like in 1902? Short answer? The vapors of sorrow. 

Hope is comedy. The sadness of the world is irrational. This is how I live. I think of Auden’s line: “All we are not stares back at what we are.” If an empowered disability identity is “out” and on the street it’s ironies are inherently complicated by the acculturated language of normalcy. This is both a signature subject for performance theory and disability studies. It is also the seed bed of literary consciousness. Watch out! The crip writers are comics. 

There’s nothing funny about the life and death struggles of the disabled who are right now protesting outside government buildings and being manhandled by police for daring to defend the right to live. Don’t get me wrong. But political activism is always a sophisticated troubling of the public nerve, it always resists normalcy. That may be the only definition of hope in our time.

The disabled want jobs. They want to live in their communities. They want health care.  Imagine! How radical!

Meanwhile, I sang a song at the end of class yesterday, a song I first heard sung by Pete Seeger called “The Blind Fiddler”. Here are the lyrics:

I lost my eyes in the blacksmith shop in the year of fifty-six
While dusting out a t-flange, which was out of fix
It bounded from the tongs, and there concealed my doom

I am a blind fiddler, and far from my home

I’ve been to San Francisco, I’ve been to Dr. Lane
He operated on one o’ my eyes, but nothing could he gain
He told me that I’d never see, and it’s no use to mourn

I am a blind fiddler, and far from my home

I have a wife and three little ones dependin’ now on me
To share all my troubles, whatever they may be
I hope that they’ll be careful, while I’m compelled to

I am a blind fiddler, and far from my home

I say, as all disabled people must now say, this is our home, this America, right here, and we’re not going to beg.