Author: stevekuusisto

We want to thank Elizabeth Aquino for her attention to the story of Tomas Young whose worsening paralysis has led him to announce that he has chosen to die. War goes on long after the smoke has cleared. It enters the cells of our bodies, even the bodies of those who stayed home. War takes up residence in our food and turns up in what we say and what we do not say. All life appears cheapened and coarse. We stop paying attention to human dignity, redefining it as utility, waterboarding isn’t torture; the national security state doesn’t impinge our freedoms. The language of heartless approximations is easy. The devaluation of life is not easy. It means we have given up on people who look like us and those who don’t. We are all now like the poet Cesar Vallejo who wrote about tearing out his heart and putting it under his shoe. It doesn’t matter whether we believe in Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious” or we’re worshipful–we are more jaded and morally impoverished because of the Bush wars. We don’t need data though there’s plenty of it, the thousand plus shootings in the US following the carnage in Sandy Hook, the evidence of rising intolerance that leads to rape culture.

When journalists trumpet the announced suicide of a wounded and depressed veteran because the story exemplifies the heinous and excruciating domestic effects of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, then they too become morally devalued. Those who keep silent or who turn the page are also reduced.

The only way out of this enervation of the soul is perhaps best described by Jesus:

“You have heard the law that says, ‘Love your neighbor’ and hate your enemy. But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. If you love only those who love you, what reward is there for that? Even corrupt tax collectors do that much. If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else?” (Matthew 5:43-47 )

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Last week I wrote the following on this blog about journalist Chris Hedges' post on Truthdig concerning the decision by paralyzed veteran Tomas Young to end his life–a decision that Hedges doesn't question and which is being spread across news outlets without interrogation. That a depressed, disillusioned, and paralyzed veteran would chose to end his life seems "right" to liberal commentators because in point of fact they haven't examined their assumptions about disability and the actual living of disability lives:

via www.planet-of-the-blind.com

I think the Pope's decision to kiss a man with a disability is a minor infraction compared to this story.

The TSA (Transportation and Security Administration) claims on its official blog that a wounded Marine was not asked to remove his prosthetic legs and forced to stand from his wheelchair as the Wasington Times first reported.

What seems clear is the TSA’s inability to acknowledge how humiliating it is for all travelers with disabilities to undergo screenings–I’ve been asked to hand over my guide dog, have been pushed, prodded, left to grope for my possessions, have been summarily and rudely ordered about, and generally demeaned for years. I’ve had good experiences of course, but what’s indisputable is how much my navigation of security checkpoints is influenced by the quality of the staff on duty at any given moment. Travelers with disabilities receive conditional or chance receptions at airports.

One may say the same for all travelers–stories of parents with small children who are unduly frightened or traumatized are legion. There’s no doubt the TSA has ongoing problems both of judgment and public relations.

As bad as the disability experience is at airports I will say to any and all who wish to privatize the TSA (for there’s always a call for this) that the old days of on the cheap security companies meant even worse treatment. I remember non English speaking agents dressed in maroon jump suits, yelling at me because I had a dog.

The TSA says the wounded marine “chose” to stand as if that settles the matter. But in my experience people don’t spontaneously make bad and painful choices. The TSA has some serious work to do in terms of its cultural awareness of disabilities.

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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.

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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.

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

And track-side warehouses pulling the twilight close.

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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.

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