Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University

National Federation of the Blind Releases Analysis of Section 511

 

 

Former DOJ Official Says Proposal is “Stunning Step Backward,”
Undermines Olmstead

 

Baltimore, Maryland (August 14, 2013): The National Federation of the Blind today released a legal analysis prepared at the organization’s request by Samuel R. Bagenstos, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School and former Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the United States Department of Justice, regarding the proposed Section 511 of Title V of the Rehabilitation Act included in the Workforce Investment Act reauthorization bill.  The report, entitled “Section 511 is Not a Step Forward,” concludes that the provision “entrenches sheltered workshops and the subminimum wage—and for the first time recognizes them as acceptable under the rights provisions of the Rehabilitation Act, our Nation’s first disability rights law.  This is a stunning step backwards.”

 

Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: “Professor Bagenstos’s trenchant analysis confirms our conviction that Section 511 will not prevent young people from being tracked into subminimum-wage employment.  Worse yet, as this analysis shows, Section 511 will actually undermine efforts to enforce the integration mandate of the Americans with Disabilities Act, with respect to employment, through the landmark Supreme Court case of Olmstead v. L.C.  At a time when the Department of Justice is seeking to prevent the segregation and exploitation of Americans with disabilities in sheltered, subminimum-wage employment, Section 511 would make such employment part of the Rehabilitation Act, the nation’s first disability rights law.  The National Federation of the Blind and our partners are fighting to have this harmful provision removed from the proposed Workforce Investment Act.  We call upon all Americans who are concerned about the future for young people and other Americans with disabilities to join us in this fight.” 

 

The Workforce Investment Act (S. 1356) was recently reported favorably by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. 

 

 

something we can miss

leaves shaded green for morning

paths for both hands

the gift of smoke, echoes in rooms

 

sometimes our eyes were bitter

when birds had flown away


–after the Finnish of Niilo Rauhala


 

 

What's on the Menu? The Manhattan Service Dog Blues

  

If you’re like me and you travel with a guide dog you learn a lot about discrimination. Over the last twenty years I’ve been barred from entering restaurants and book stores, riding in taxis and even boarding a jet liner because untrained service personnel either didn’t know what a guide dog was, or they just didn’t care. The indignities I’ve experienced are common among people with disabilities who rely on professionally trained dogs to help them walk, cross streets, open doors, resist falling, or prevent seizures.

 

The article by Tara Palmeri in today’s New York Post entitled “Liars Use Phony Vests and ID Tags to Get Fake Service Dogs Into Posh New York Restaurants” is one of the most willfully underhanded pieces about disability I’ve ever seen in a newspaper–and I should add I’m a veteran of the sixties. I’ve seen and heard some big league untruths in my time. Palmeri (who is convinced fake service animals and phony disabilities are a scourge) has found her metier–inflaming the public by insisting there are ersatz cripples everywhere. 

 

Ms. Palmeri isn’t sophisticated but she’s onto something: stories about sham cripples have always sparked the public nerve. The first commercial movies in the United States were often about men who pretended to be blind or paralyzed until the cops arrived. Then they were suddenly cured and in grand comic fashion they ran like hell.  What’s especially interesting about those films is they were written and produced in an age marked by “the ugly laws” which forbade real disabled people from appearing on the streets. Palmeri writes about a complex issue pretending to knowledge but like those early films, the presentation is a trick. Real people with disabilities are being treated to a serious disservice by the Post. 

 

I have no doubt there are people smuggling their golden retrievers onto airplanes by claiming old “Tucker” or “Sparky” is a service dog. But I’ll wager my future false teeth there are fewer people doing this than, say, swiping handicapped parking spaces–and the latter not just occasionally, but every minute every day. 

 

Of course you can’t legislate morality. But the “L” word is in fact the real issue for the New York Post which has always hated the Americans with Disabilities Act. Restaurants and businesses all across the country hate the ADA–but especially in Manhattan where there’s been more hand wringing and whinging about installing accessible toilets and ramps than in most other cities. Opposition to the ADA in New York has blossomed greatly under the successive administrations of Giuliani and Bloomberg.    

 

What really bothers the post is the very existence of the ADA. One way to inveigle the public (which generally likes the law) is to trot out the old movie trick. “Did you know, Mavis, there are fake cripples bringing their filthy pet poodles into Le Cirque?” Under the ADA people with disabilities are not required to produce papers or certificates proving they have a disability or proving their service dog is real. Why? (Ms. Palmeri presents this freedom from paper as an even greater scandal than the salmon swallowing poodle she’s managed to smuggle into a restaurant.) The answer of course is that the ADA is a civil rights law. It guarantees people with disabilities the right to go anywhere the general public goes. If I leave my house to visit the drug store I don’t have to produce a document saying what my disability is, or what my dog has been trained to do. This is called decency in some quarters. 

 

Palmeri plays at street theater. She brings untrained dogs into eateries, lets them behave badly and posits the idea that this is terribly unfair to everyone. And its all because of that damned disability act. 

 

What the Post doesn’t tell you is this: service dogs are not guaranteed access to public spaces or restaurants. If they behave badly you can ask the owner to leave.    

 

A service dog is not a pet. Its training encompasses both the realities of disability assistance and public manners. Guide dogs are allowed everywhere by law and part of the reason is they’re impeccable guests in all public spaces.   

 

You would never guess any of this from reading Ms. Palmeri’s prose. Dishonest? You bet.


Related post: http://badcripple.blogspot.com/2013/08/tara-palmeri-on-service-dogs-misleading.html


 

Morning Fragments

 

 

Now an old man comes down the street, a kind of scrawny angel, pushing a bent bicycle. The spokes flash in the sun. He’s a war veteran. Compared to him everyone else in the world is motionless. 

 

**

Squirrel on a telephone line, I swear, he’s Jimmy Cagney.

 

**

 

 

Everyone loves a fairy tale, even my late father who was a rational Scandinavian academic. In my dad’s case he used to imagine creatures at the bottom of the lake, things with lots of appendages. He’d talk to them in his brand of old Finnish. It was his way of not drowning. 

 

 

 

 


Regret

By Andrea Scarpino

 

Moving away from my brother in high school: I saved myself, but I’ve always felt like I left him behind. Arriving at the hospital after my father died. Lashing out at others when I feel vulnerable. Not embracing joy when it clearly presents itself. Having bought a house. Unkind words I have said precisely because they were unkind. 

 

In his speech this spring to Syracuse University’s graduating class, George Saunders writes, “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.” I’ve been thinking about that, what it means to fail at kindness. What it means to have regret. 

 

A philosopher friend named Jesse brought up regret several nights ago at dinner. He described it as something potentially positive, described a fondness for thinking back at moments in his life that might have gone many different directions. As the conversation progressed, Zac wondered whether having regret means you’ve lived a full life, that you’ve had many choices available to you and had to make some tough decisions about which paths to follow. Maybe a life without regret means you’ve never had to make tough decisions. Maybe a life without regret means you’ve never had the opportunity to regret. 

 

I don’t regret taking on so much student loan debt—it allowed me to live more comfortably, to spend time in college developing wonderful friendships. I don’t regret all the time I’ve spent in school. I don’t regret traveling, no matter a trip’s expense, hardship, or food poisoning. I don’t regret having hung up on people who were saying mean things. I don’t regret having written a single poem, even the terrible poems, even the poems no one wants to publish. I don’t even regret having spent whole afternoons watching reality TV. 

 

At the end of his speech, Saunders tells Syracuse’s graduating class, “And someday, in 80 years, when you’re 100, and I’m 134, and we’re both so kind and loving we’re nearly unbearable, drop me a line, let me know how your life has been.  I hope you will say: It has been so wonderful.” 

 

And maybe our wonderful lives will be filled with regret. And maybe they won’t. But I hope that looking back when I’m 134, even my most regret-filled memories will have a tinge of sweetness. As Jesse says, I hope they will demonstrate what a rich, full, wide-open life I have lived. The choices I’ve had. The many opportunities.