There was a book in my dream last night. As the poet Robert Bly would say, there was a pirate ship sailing through dark flowers. And so my unconscious lent me its ocean.
When I was a boy, legally blind, down on my hands and knees at the shore I’d trace the whorls and lines in sea shells, my nose so close I caught the strict scent of the underworld.
Tonight at 8:00 pm on Nickelodeon, a show called “Out of sight: How Blind Kids See The World.”
Here’s the synopsis on their website:
If you want to make something harder, trying do it with your eyes closed.
Not easy, right?
For most of us, things get much easier when we open our eyes again.
But for some kids, a lack of sight is a challenge they have to face for the rest of their lives.
On Monday, January 28th, at 8:00 p.m. (Eastern/Pacific), kids across America will talk about living with blindness – and overcoming it.
That’s the focus of the next edition of Nick News with Linda Ellerbee.
It’s called, “Out of Sight: How Blind Kids See the World.”
“When I lost my sight, I started to feel depressed,” a boy named Santiago says. “I was bumping into stuff … and I felt like I couldn’t do anything anymore.”
He now knows he was wrong.
“You use your other senses,” he says.
“In middle school, kids would tease me,” says a girl named Brittany. “They would take my pencils and hide them because they know I couldn’t see them.”
Now, though, she says, “I don’t believe being visually impaired limits me in any way.”
A girl named Xin Ju says she even sees being blind as an advantage.
“I don’t need to see something to believe in it,” she says. “We use our hearts and our imaginations.”
And a girl named Sophie says she sees her blindness “as a blessing.”
“I can never miss what I’ve never had,” she says. “(And) my parents have never treated me differently.”
What do all of these kids want you to know about their lives?
And how should you react if you meet a kid who can’t see?
You’ll find out the answers to those questions when you tune into Nick News with Linda Ellerbee on Monday, January 28th, at 8:00 p.m. (Eastern/Pacific), for the premiere of “Out of Sight: How Blind Kids See the World.”
(If you live in a different time zone, check your local cable TV listings to find out when the program will be on in your area.)
Get some insight, from kids who’ve learned to live their lives without sight.
Here is the link to the site:
http://news.nick.com/01/2013/25/kids-see-through-the-challenges-of-blindness/
Editor’s note: you probably couldn’t produce this in Belgium…
(Jewish Voice NY)
January 28, 2013
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] The 11 cast members of “Not By Bread Alone” are all deaf, blind or visually impaired. And speaking of unconventional, the play begins with the cast members baking bread on stage. Throughout the play, the bread is kneaded, formed and baked, as the extraordinary storytellers convey their memories and dreams.
First, the show began running in Tel Aviv. Then, it traveled to London, where audience members gave a standing ovation to the world’s “only professional deaf-blind ensemble.” Last month, it made its US premiere at the NYU Skirball Center to equally staggering reviews.
When director Adina Tal was originally approached 14 years ago to run a two-month workshop for a deaf-blind social club, she agreed. The traveling workshop evolved into a theater company, and in 2007 the troupe moved to its permanent home, the Nalagaat Center in the old Jaffa port of Tel Aviv. “There was no other deaf-blind theater group,” said Ms. Tal, 59, president and artistic director of Nalagaat. “I always regretted that I’d been born too late to establish the state of Israel. This was a gift — a chance to invent the wheel.”
The cast presents a collection of autobiographical skits and anecdotes, which give captivating insights into their inner worlds. “What I find important is that whoever I meet shakes my hand, because this way, I know he exists,” said cast member Shoshana Segal.
Entire article:
Audiences Flock to See Blind-Deaf Ensemble
http://tinyurl.com/bxxcd8v
Related:
Nalagaat, Israeli Troupe of Deaf-Blind Actors (New York Times)
http://tinyurl.com/ide0128136b
(USA Today)
January 28, 2013
WASHINGTON, DC– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] What the nation owes each year to veterans who are disabled during service has more than doubled since 2000, rising from $14.8 billion to $39.4 billion in 2011, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The toll of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where troops served repeatedly in combat zones, is a key contributor to escalating costs of individual disability payouts, says Allison Hickey, VA undersecretary for benefits.
“I would point first and foremost to multiple deployments,” says Hickey, a retired Air Force brigadier general. “I would call it unprecedented demand.”
The 3.4 million men and women disabled during their service — some of them having served in World War II — are about 15% of the nation’s 22.2 million veterans.
The disabled veteran population has increased 45% since 2000 and may grow sharply with a new generation who seek compensation for more ailments and are savvier than their elders about their VA rights, say Hickey and veterans advocates.
Entire article:
Veteran disability costs more than doubled since 2000
http://tinyurl.com/ide0128135
Paul Krugman’s blog post entitled “From Welfare Queens to Disabled Deadbeats” relates both the realpolitik and the rhetorical irresponsibility of our age. By “realpolitik” I mean good old fashioned preservation of power. By rhetorical irresponsibility I mean the red herring that social programs are the cause of our nation’s financial woes. Krugman writes:
If you want to understand the trouble Republicans are in, one good place to start is with the obsession the right has lately developed with the rising disability rolls. The growing number of Americans receiving disability payments has, for many on the right, become a symbol of our economic and moral decay; we’re becoming a nation of malingerers.
Now I of course (speaking as a blind person) am a professional malingerer. In fact I wake up every day wanting mints on my pillow. I want all kinds of stuff. Public transportation, solid veterans benefits, affordable housing, easy access to disability friendly technology, free wheelchairs for those who don’t have fat incomes—I’m actually something more than a malingerer Senator Elephant, I’m a believer in the good, old fashioned social contract.
I say this having once upon a time been a recipient of Social Security Disability and Food Stamps. I also lived for a time in Section 8 housing. Why? Because I lost my adjunct teaching job largely because I was advocating too noisily for disability rights at the rinky dink college where I found myself fighting discrimination against students with disabilities. The tone deafness of the Elephant Pols has much to do with something that has nothing to do with disability and social services—it has to do with finding a new underclass to kick. Krugman writes:
What strikes me, however, isn’t just the way the right is trying to turn a reasonable development into some kind of outrage; it’s the political tone-deafness.
I mean, when Reagan ranted about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, he was inventing a fake problem — but his rant resonated with angry white voters, who understood perfectly well who Reagan was targeting. But Americans on disability as moochers? That isn’t, as far as I can tell, an especially nonwhite group — and it’s a group that is surely as likely to elicit sympathy as disdain. There’s just no way it can serve the kind of political purpose the old welfare-kicking rhetoric used to perform.
The same goes, more broadly, for the whole nation of takers thing. First of all, a lot of the “taking” involves Social Security and Medicare. And even the growth in means-tested programs is largely accounted for by the Earned Income Tax Credit — which requires and rewards work — and the expansion of Medicaid/CHIP to cover more children. Again, not the greatest of political targets.
The point, I think, is that right-wing intellectuals and politicians live in a bubble in which denunciations of those bums on disability and those greedy children getting free health care are greeted with shouts of approval — but now have to deal with a country where the same remarks come across as greedy and heartless (because they are).
And I don’t think this is a problem that can be solved with a slight change in the rhetoric.
I don’t know what kind of bubble the elephant classes are living in. I suspect its a small bubble which is of course a matter of some substantial irony. But there are lives in the balance. I urge people with disabilities to fight back: don’t become today’s Reaganite “Welfare Queens” in Washingtonian discourse.
Technorati Tags: Welfare Queens, Paul Krugman, Disability Deadbeats
Take a look at “Bad Cripple’s” take on the recent story of the waiter who defended a boy with Down Syndrome. (For a link to that story click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/26/opinion/a-child-with-down-syndrome-keeps-his-place-at-the-table.html?_r=1&)
BC’s piece incorporates his (and my) recent difficulties while dining out. Space, welcoming space is still all too provisional for people with disabilities.
All day I’ve been trying to slip the tag of these blues–the baseball analogy seems right–the blues has the ball and I’m sliding slowly and painfully into his hard touch. It takes hours to slide.
When I got up today I was rounding third, fresh from a dream where I was lost in a far city, some place in China. People kept pointing to my face, my wandering, ineffective eyes–they’d point and laugh and no one would answer my questions.
I know it was my childhood and adolescence. Since the unconscious likes novelty it threw in some strange Asian people, but they were really just the principal and students of my high school who didn’t want me in the classroom–any classroom–the irritating blind kid. How they hated my very existence. And there was the track coach who wouldn’t let me run on his team because a blind kid was a liability. He and some of the students in his circle laughed at me, demanding I return the track suit. Laughed and pointed.
I have a disability. Some days I’m running in three worlds: the open field of my imagination (where I entertain optimism), the daily hurdles of American life (where I’m prevented from riding in a taxi because of my guide dog) and the city of deep memory (where I will always be a humiliated boy who simply wanted to fit in). All of the running is difficult, sub-aquatic, and slow, horribly slow.
When I read yesterday that Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa has decided not to seek reelection after forty years of public service I felt like weeping. I was sitting on an Amtrak train on my way home to Syracuse and somewhere around Poughkeepsie I found the article with my talking iPad. I felt just then a sense of deep and profound loss for Senator Harkin has often been the only friend of Americans with disabilities in the US senate. I do not feel I’m exaggerating here. While other senators have voted for measures designed to help people with disabilities no other man or woman on Capitol Hill has been so consistent, brave, undaunted and fierce on our behalf. No one.
Earlier today when the blues caught the ball, when I was turning the corner for home, fresh from a bad dream, I wrote on Facebook that its hard to imagine who might take Senator Harkin’s place, and pointed out that liberals and neo-liberals are no better when it comes to disability than many conservatives. You can’t count on democrats. I am, for all intents and purposes, rather terrified. People with disabilities are about to lose the best friend in politics they’ve ever had.
Running in three worlds. Slow motion.
(Mad in America)
January 25, 2013
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] Scapegoating is an ancient human practice that probably dates from the time the first human beings decided to circle their huts — what we fondly term the dawn of civilization. When things got tense in the compound, penalties got handed out to one or more individuals or families, those usually at the low end of the pole, the politically powerless or vulnerable. It beat killing one another and rending the social fabric, that thin veneer of civilization.
Americans, despite our vaunted exceptionalism — or maybe consequent to it — have been aces at the practice and have always had a long list of candidates.
The list has evolved and grown since 9/11, but I’ll stop with the most recent candidates for marginalization, those persons presumed to be mentally ill and excluded from Joe Biden’s list of “. . . law-abiding responsible Americans [who have the right to] bear arms . . .”
How ironic that folks who are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violent crimes will now occupy a prominent place in the Federal gun background check data bank.
Entire article:
Scapegoating Persons Labelled Mentally Ill: The Politics of Marginalization
Last night in tony Mt. Kisco New York I pushed a friend’s manual wheelchair up a snowy and steep sidewalk. In order to push I had to heel my guide dog and steer the chair with one hand, the dog following. Expensive cars whispered past. All the cars in Mt. Kisco are BMWs or Mercedes; the basest rig is a Range Rover.
I imagined the drivers who saw us thought we were homeless men, sad war veterans, poor and defeated cripples making our way by means of mutual aid. Probably some of them thought: “There but for the grace of God go I.” Or they shivered. Or they thought nothing at all. But its a good bet they thought something akin to the above.
And what they wouldn’t have known is that we are two esteemed scholars, professors at noteworthy colleges, that we’d been talking of bio-ethics, contemporary politics, the changing nature of the human body in an age of astonishing technologies. That we were alive and willfully happy with our careers, our friendship, and the fresh falling snow.
Americans still haven’t learned how to read disability. They tend to get the semiotics wrong. We were laughing our asses off.
(Associated Press)
January 24, 2013
WASHINGTON, DC– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] Breaking new ground, the U.S. Education Department is telling schools they must include students with disabilities in sports programs or provide equal alternative options.
Schools would be required to make “reasonable modifications” for students with disabilities or create parallel athletic programs that have comparable standing as mainstream programs.
Federal laws, including the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, require states to provide a free public education to all students and bans schools that receive federal funds from discriminating against students with disabilities. Going further, the new directive from the Education Department’s civil rights division explicitly tells schools and colleges that access to interscholastic, intramural and intercollegiate athletics is a right.
“This is a landmark moment for students with disabilities. This will do for students with disabilities what Title IX did for women,” said Terri Lakowski, who led a coalition pushing for the changes for a decade. “This is a huge victory.”
Entire article:
Education Department: Sports are a civil right for disabled
http://www.courierpostonline.com/viewart/20130125/NEWS05/301250032/
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Planet of the Blind 