Author: stevekuusisto

Full story here:

http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-family-kicked-off-flight-downs-syndrome,0,6588580,print.story

Just to be clear about the matter, discrimination is always dressed up by false claims about the general good. The pilot who claimed that a child with Down syndrome couldn’t fly on his cross country flight from Newark to Los Angeles because he might distract the crew and thereby affect the safe operation of the aircraft was using the time honored future perfect rationalization of bigots everywhere. Something bad might happen if we let the laborers have the weekend off, if we let people of color read, if we let blind people navigate with dogs. The story of Joan and Robert Vanderhorst and their son Bede breaks my heart and it’s an outrage.

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Who was I today? In the morning I talked to three men working at a construction site in Manhattan, alerting them to the fact that they’d closed off the sidewalk without imagining accessibility for detouring pedestrians. They seemed hostile at first, then oddly they decided I was a good samaritan and later, when I passed their site, they had put in a ramp. Who was I today? I stuck my neck out with strangers, tried to do the right thing on behalf of other people with disabilities. And it was early in the morning in New York and raining.

In the afternoon I realized that both political parties in the US are using nostalgia. Romney’s version is a cross between the homey stage set of “It’s a Beautiful LIfe” and the singing Disney dwarves, happy to go to work with their lunch buckets and mops. Obama’s is an admixture of the New Deal and Bill Clinton’s reakpolitik, therefore insufficiently insistent on taking the fight to the GOP. He has a chance tomorrow night.

Political nostalgia demands irony and the voters don’t have enough of it to go around.

Who was I today? I talked to someone about disability and the arts and teenagers, imagining a program for kids with disabilities. So I day dreamed a bit. I did some of my day dreaming out loud.

Who was I today? I wanted to be someone larger than myself. I wanted to make a difference. I wasn’t nostalgic. I wanted to walk ahead with my head up high like my guide dog does.

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I wasn’t useful anymore. I was slipped from the nest, easy does it. Out. But strangely I am still here. My utility is up in the cross winds, a home made kite–you know the one, the kite made of newsprint with a picture of Dwight D. Eisenhower folded across the underside.

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Birch branches curve slightly upward, less insistent than the oak. Across the street from me, in a different building, is a man who can explain why this is so, but we do not know each other. 

Meantime, I guide my life by dreams, inefficient as always, prone to depression, occasionally putting my forehead down on the wet lawn early. 

We have received the following email from our good friend Scott Lissner, the distinguished ADA Coordinator at The Ohio State University. We thought we’d share it on POTB:

I have always felt history is important and September is a rich month of contrasts, the weather turns from summer to  autumn, the academic year replaces summer break; both Elvis Presley (9/9/1956) and Star Trek (9/8/1966) broke into our national consciousness; President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation (9/22/1862) and President Eisenhower ordered the National Guard to enforce racial integration of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas (9/24/1957)

I want to highlight two events related to disability.  The culmination of state sponsored eugenics programs with the initiation of Germany’s T4 Program that began eliminating individuals with genetic disabilities to so they and their potential children would not burden the state (9/1/1939) and the passage of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act which was the United States first step in guaranteeing civil rights for the disabled (9/26/1973).  Below are summaries and resources surrounding these two events

EUGENICS & STATE SANCTIONED DISCRIMINATION

What became known as the T4 Program, and arguably the Nazi Holocaust  began 72 years ago.  Hitler’s euthanasia decree, dated September 1, 1939, read as follows:

“Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with the responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, to the end that patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment [menschlichem Ermessen] of their state of health, can be granted a mercy death [Gnadentod].”

This effort began with the  1933 less than six months after Hitler became chancellor with the  “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases” This law established a policy mandating the sterilization  of anyone with suffering from diseases considered hereditary  including  mental illness, cognitive disabilities, physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism.  The scientific and social basis for Nazi eugenics program was largely imported from the eugenics movement in the United States where laws in twenty-nine states forced  sterilizations on more than 30,000 people between 1907 and 1939.

Forced sterilization and the  systematic killing of the disabled where Germany’s first steps in the Holocaust   The T4 euthanasia program was both a rehearsal and justification for Nazi Germany’s subsequent genocidal policies.  Extended the ideological justification for eliminating the  “unfit” from society to other categories of perceived “genetic” threat to society.  The gas chambers and accompanying crematorium designed for the T4 campaign where later utilized to murder Jews, Roma, Sinti and other undesirable and the architects of the T4 program became key figures at among killing centers of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka 

Further Informaiton:

A Teachers Guide to the Holocaust Includes a section on Handicapped: Victims of the Nazi Era, 1933-1945

The Holocaust History Project  Includes the entire text of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide  Robert Jay Lifton

The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies including The exhibition of the “Hospital” in Hadamar,

Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany  Horst Biesold

-30 –

SECTION 504 AND EMERGING RIGHTS

On September 25^th of 1973 President Nixon signed Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.  In D.C. the Department of Health Education and Welfare began writing the regulations to ensure that the civil rights objectives of Section 504 could be enforced.  Here in Columbus the Ohio State University began plans for the Office for Disability Services. Three years later the University was forging ahead to ensure access but the regulations to enforce Section 504 were stalled.  On April 5, 1977, thousands of “the disabled” converged on Department of Health, Education and Welfare offices around the country to demand that the equal rights legislation Congress had passed 5 years earlier be implemented.  In San Francisco they took over the HEW Office and started what became the longest  sit-in occupation of a federal building in U.S. history

At 7:30 A.M. on April 28, 1977 they celebrated victory.  The rules implementing Section 504 were signed by HEW Secretary Joseph A. Califano.  Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 is a civil-rights provision. It does not provide funding for any programs or activities; rather, it is a requirement that accompanies federal funding to organizations such as schools and universities. Any organization that receives federal funds – for any purpose – must comply with section 504. Section 504 laid the ground work for the American’s With Disabilities Act of 1990 which established broad civil rights protections for individuals with disabilities.  The community spirit, respect and collaboration that lead to the signing of Section 504 was seen again this past year as the disability community worked with Congress to pass the ADA Amendments Act

“The San Francisco 504 sit-in did not succeed because of a brilliant strategy by a few disability leaders. It succeeded because the Deaf people set up a communication system from the 4th floor windows inside the building to the plaza down below; because the Black Panther Party brought a hot dinner to all 150 participants every single night; because people from community organizing backgrounds taught us how to make collaborative decisions; because friends came and washed our hair in the janitor’s closet sink.   The people doing disability rights work in the 1970s rarely agreed on policies, or even on approaches. The successes came because people viewed each other as invaluable resources working towards a common goal.” (Corbett Joan O’Toole, Ragged Edge Online October 19, 2005) 

Resources

A Look Back at ‘Section 504’: San Francisco Sit-In a Defining Moment

http://www.npr.org/programs/wesun/features/2002/504/

The 25 Day Siege That Brought Us 504

http://www.independentliving.org/docs4/ervin1986.html

The Section 504 rules: More to the story

http://www.ragged-edge-mag.com/0102/0102ft6.html

Multiple Perspectives On Access Inclusion & Disability Conference

http://ada.osu.edu/conferences/  

A History: Disability at Ohio State

http://digitalunion.osu.edu/r2/summer06/kmetz/index.html

We were young once. We watched the stars canvas first thoughts. Kid stuff. Clean. Knock knock. Who’s there? Gerard Manley Hopkins. Taught us the serious worship of joy. Here comes the bird whose wingspan opens like pages in wind. I was trying to read poems to a girl in a meadow. We were young once. This was only seconds ago. Finland. A meadow fit for life after life after life.

By Andrea Scarpino

I don’t think of myself as an optimistic person. I smile more than I should (a counselor friend in college used to tell me I have “inappropriate affect”), but I don’t believe the world is an inherently good place or that situations generally turn out for the best. I have far too many counterexamples to prove otherwise. 

But since my visit to the Mayo Clinic and completing my mindfulness course, I’ve been working hard on how I see the world around me, on how I react to stressful situations, on how I respond to people who seem hell-bent on being jerks. Buddhists will tell you that you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to what happens to you. Meditation instructor Sally Kempton puts it this way: “You always have a choice about how you think or behave.” 

In taking on that philosophy, though, I’ve found that I also take on an incredible amount of responsibility for every thought, for every word I speak. If I always have a choice, then I have to assign myself some blame when I choose poorly, when I assume the worst in a colleague, for example, when I lash out at my mother on the phone, when I’m less-than-polite with a customer service representative. 

Which leads me to this challenge: every day for the month of September, I am going to try to choose happiness. Not choose to be happy—I’m not optimistic enough to go that far. But choose to see happiness around me, to see my life as filled with happiness in many small and large ways. And I’m going to tweet every day the happiness I choose. And because I am new at this, I’m inviting everyone I know to do the same (#choosinghappiness). Why not spend a month trying to choose happiness and see where that takes us? Why not find support in the happiness of those around us? 

Maybe this is just positive psychology mumbo jumbo, maybe just spiritual hooey magic—I’m certainly open to both possibilities. But research in neuroscience, biology, psychology tells us that the brain can be rewired, that stress can be reduced through mindfulness practice, that we can create much of our experience of the world. So why not try to create an experience filled with happiness? 

Beyond optimism or pessimism, beyond any religious or academic doctrine, I am a follower of the poet Nazim Hikmet. Because of his work, I live with an understanding that “This earth will grow cold,/a star among stars/and one of the smallest.” Because of his work, I “grieve for this right now.” But also because of his work, I live “without looking for something beyond and/above living.” Because of his work, I want to “take living so seriously/that even at seventy, for example, you will plant olives.” Every day this month, then, I dedicate myself to seeing the olive trees. To planting olives.

Dear Allies,

This Guide,   The Thoughtful Voter’s Guide to Same-Sex Marriage: A Tool for the Decided, the Undecided and the Genuinely Perplexed,  was written by David Morris to provide all of us with a tool to distribute to those who are (a) advocates for, (b) confused about, (c) organizing to secure universal marriage rights.  Some people are having the booklet printed and are distributing it as paper text.  Some are using it electronically.  Many are doing both.  We hope you will take the initiative to get it into the hands (or before the eyes) of everyone you know, but especially those in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington, all of which have constitutional amendments on the issue on this November’s ballot.

Thank you for doing all that you can to ensure that marriage becomes a true commons, available to all equally.

Toward equality and with love,

Harriet Barlow

–after Lars Gustafson

I often walk about saying I’m in equilibrium, saying that everything balances,

and I have a little song on my lips, and though its imperfect

it is mine–a forest ditty with words from the age of home made harps.

Of my singing I can say very little, it’s a quiet means of standing

and in this I am not joking. I whisper and murmur 

hold and guess, pause at windows

trying a song of penitence before glass.

If there was more to my life I would say so. 

I wake in the morning, sleep at night, my song unvarying.

When neighbors come they do not hear my singing,

but I’m working toward peace, softest words on my tongue, 

in equilibrium, letting the sadnesses drift

and only I and the dogs can hear them.  

Dear Id: I have just now stepped off the train. I have raised the flag of metaphor beside the painful river of waking. I am standing in tall weeds. 

At the outer limits of phenomenology there’s a terrible freedom. I am wearing my soulful little eyeglass frames.