The Justice Department announced today that it has entered into an agreement with the state of North Carolina to ensure the state is in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Rehabilitation Act. The agreement will transform the state’s system for serving people with mental illness. Under the settlement agreement, over the next eight years, North Carolina’s system will expand community-based services and supported housing that promote inclusion and independence and enable people with mental illness to participate fully in community life.

See today’s settlement agreement, fact sheet, and complaint.

To learn more about the Department’s efforts to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision in Olmstead v. L.C. and about the Americans with Disabilities Act, go to www.ADA.gov  or call the ADA Information Line at 800-514-0301 (voice) or 800-514-0383 (TTY). 

Song at a window

and night coming fast,

the score 

hard to read–

my grandmother sits 

in that other dark

where 

all that is empty 

waits for revelation. 

Singing  

is always a discovery. 

NCD Recommends Phasing Out Subminimum Wage Payments

Baltimore, Maryland (August 23, 2012): The National Federation of the Blind, the nation’s leading advocate for fair wages for workers with disabilities, today applauded the National Council on Disability (NCD) for recommending a phase-out of the practice of paying wages below the federal minimum  to workers with disabilities.  The NCD, an independent federal agency that advises the President, Congress, and the federal government on matters of disability policy, has released a report calling for a phase-out and repeal of Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which exempts certain employers of people with disabilities from paying their workers the federal minimum wage.

Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: “We applaud the National Council on Disability for its strong affirmation of the value, equality, and dignity of workers with disabilities, and for its recommendation that Section 14(c) ultimately be repealed.  We will thoroughly review the NCD report and its forthcoming legislative proposal in order to find ways to work toward our common goal of eliminating the unfair, discriminatory, and immoral practice of paying workers with disabilities less than the federal minimum wage.”

CRPD Ratification Social Media ACTION ALERT

#CRPD ACTION ALERT!

Use Social Media to Secure YOUR Senators’ Support for U.S. Ratification!

After an exciting spring and summer that has now delivered the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to the Senate floor for one final vote, the Senate is out on recess and the Senators are back in their home states.  We’ve asked you to call and write, visit and go to events and do anything you can to secure both of your U.S. Senators’ support for the CRPD for when they return September 10th.  We thank all of you for all the hard work you have been putting in!

But we can’t quit now!  The opposition is gearing up and using social media to inundate the Senators with misinformation about the CRPD.  The disability community needs to answer back, and in greater numbers!  You, your family and friends can use Twitter and Facebook and any other social media you belong to in order to spread the word about supporting the CRPD!

Here are some useful tips to help you with Twitter and Facebook:

• Important: Use #CRPD to weigh in on your message of support for the CRPD!
• Tweet directly  to your Senators by using the @ symbol and their twitter address. You can find your Senators’ twitter address by going to their website (found here) and looking for the Twitter symbol, or searching for them on directly Twitter.  And remember every state has 2 Senators.  Tweet to both of them! 
• Keep your message short, to the point and POSITIVE!
• Don’t know what to write? Follow USICD on Twitter and get ideas for new CRPD tweets!
• Don’t just post once and walk away – come back again later that day and for days after and keep tweeting! It only takes a few seconds but the impact is tremendous!
• Ask your friends and family to tweet and re-tweet!    
• Re-tweet your friends and family!
• Ideas for messages:

1. Dear @(your Senator’s twitter address here) Please support ratification of the #CRPD!
2. @(your Senator’s twitter address here) Support the #CRPD.  This is a #disability issue!
3.  @(your Senator’s twitter address here) I am a (describe your connection to the community ex. parent of a child with a #disability, person with a #disability, friend of people with #disabilities) and I support the #CRPD.  Please do the same!

 FACEBOOK  

• Visit your Senator’s Facebook page and post positive messages about supporting the CRPD.  You can find your Senator’s Facebook pages on their websites, and you can find their websites by clicking here.
• Choose a time when you know a lot of your friends and family are on Facebook to post so that more people have the chance to share.
• Ask people to Share and Like your links to spread the word about supporting the CRPD.
• Link to USICD’s CRPD Updates page and choose the CRPD “Ratify Yes!” sticker as the image.
• Look through the USICD CRPD Updates page and check out some of the letters of support on the right side of the page, “News and Calls for Ratification” on the bottom of the page, and video clips in the middle of the page.  Write your positive comments about them and share them as a link.    
• Keep your messages positive!

Finally, be sure to let us know what you’re hearing as you activate your Twitter and Facebook accounts  – email Esme Grant (egrant@usicd.org)  with important updates.

Most importantly, get out there on the web and show your support!  We need 2/3 of the Senate to ratify and we can’t do it without the whole community!

When I was young I imagined a just and improvable world even though Bobby Kennedy was murdered in middle of the season of my innocence. Then Dr. King was murdered and my optimism was shaken by the first sorrows of a believer. The election of Richard Nixon was a crushing cultural moment and I wept in our suburban living room in Delmar, New York. I was only 13 when Nixon beat Humphrey. I remember being inconsolable. 

Because I am not a conspiracy theorist I’ve never believed in a concerted effort to destroy progressive values in the United States. I think JFK was killed by a chinless psychopath. Was the FBI involved? Yes, to the extent they covered up their own failures to keep tabs on Oswald. Was there CIA collusion? No. But it makes a good movie. 

What I do know about the war on progressive values is that it sustains itself on religious intolerance. The insistence by a sizable majority of Republican voters that President Obama is a Muslim is not a matter of there being an insufficiency of biographical material about the Obamas, but rather an adopted fundamentalist Christian canard that once properly fitted excuses hatred. 

As a 13 year old I’d have thought this makes sense–the bigoted and aggressive behavior of southern whites and the predatory and imperial war machinery that brought us Viet Nam were ubiquitous. 

So its as an older man that I feel the disappointment because there’s a truth drought now. I have taken heart from the occupy movement and the evident dismay at the rightward tilt that so many people are sharing. But I’m sickened by the lack of accountability in the public square, particularly in the fifth estate–public lies are not sufficiently scrutinized, or scrutinized at all. 

I’ve never seen a politician lie as much as Mitt Romney. To paraphrase the poet Robert Bly, he lies about the time the sun comes up. He lies about everything from the president’s record on the economy to his own positions. He lies in a kind of giggling fit. In the past, flagrant lying was called to account.   

Better analysis than mine abounds, and the genealogy of the corporate consolidation of the media and the cancerous growth of tabloid journalism both in print and on television are well documented. I remember arguing with a media studies professor almost twenty years ago because I said Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death was unassailable in its thesis that a video-centric culture has overtaken a print literate society and accordingly critical thinking is in danger in the US. The film professor was caught up in the sexy ardor that many people felt for Picket Fences and she saw me as reactionary. Fox News was then in its infancy. 

So I go back and forth between overt panic over the state of our nation’s affairs and a sense of cautious hope. This is like seasickness but without the ship. On a ship they bring you consommé and toast. 

So much happens to the crows when fall comes–

the democracy of dying things is clear 

the indifference of daylight is torn

they watch without need.

Crows on the street, in grass

silent with harmony

I don’t know what to call it

talking to myself on the roof. 

Now and then I am happy and owing to the era in which I live I believe I ought to be able to explain this. That the impulse is a mistake doesn’t matter. I am the great great grandson of rationalists. I can explain to you how a lever works–I have always liked Archimedes–and I can also explain how the Roman aqueducts were built and therefore, by God I ought to be able to explain happiness.

In our present decade we’re advised that feelings of contentment or hopefulness are chemical products, and no doubt this is true. My feet are also chemical products and I see no reason to dispute the matter. The human brain is mostly carbon. So happiness is serotonin, dopamine, and electricity. This is certain. 

Gandhi said: “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” 

Then I have to ask, does the happy work I perform come from chemicals or somewhere else? Are the words I cherish nothing more than hydrogen bonds? Sense and sensibility and their achievement are the major ingredients of happiness and consciousness is fueled by electrolysis but not fed by it. In other words, beauty is twice beauty when you’re awake. 

Of course I mean awake as Thoreau used the term. The man who is awake is richly alive and curious.

Happiness is curiosity.  Obscurity and music are resolvable with curiosity. This is what makes tyrants bite the rug: no one can take curiosity from you. 

Tell me what it takes 

to communicate

with the serious and circumspect dead–

but not now, there’s a butterfly on my window.

By Andrea Scarpino

In Marquette, the weather has begun to turn cool—cooler, at least, than I expect, barely 50 degrees this morning. The light is changing, growing darker earlier in the evening, and taking on a softer, less direct glow. The trees are getting ready to change colors—bursts of yellow leaves hide here and there among the green. There’s something about the end of August that makes me feel contemplative, as if my psyche’s inward turn mirrors nature’s gearing down from summer. 

The last August of his life, I wrote to David Citino, one of my mentors at Ohio State, about how I felt like I should be getting ready to go back to school, should be drinking apple cider and eating donuts. He replied that late August reminded him of corduroy pants and a new lunchbox. And I remember thinking, yes. Exactly. So late August is here again, and I’m feeling contemplative, feeling like I need a new pair of corduroys, feeling like I should take advantage of every moment of sunlight while it lasts, feeling like I should get ready for new teachers, another year of learning. 

My dear friend Carrie visited this weekend from Wisconsin. We talked poetry, Olympics, our various animals, drank beer, ate Thai food. We walked around Marquette’s abandoned orphanage, a five-story red sandstone building with plywood boards across the windows. We tried to find a way in, but found graffiti and some abandoned mattresses instead. We hiked along Lake Superior, went to the farmers’ market, bought new clothes, sat in my living room. 

To me, at least, it was the perfect end-of-August visit, the perfect way to wrap up the summer, to move into autumn’s particularities. I know there is still some summer left—later in the week, the temperature is supposed to rise to the high 70s again. But there’s a definite change in the air, a shifting of light. A definite move away from summer’s noisy abundance into the quieter, more contemplative autumn. And I’m beginning to realize I welcome it. 

I have my own encyclopedia:

today I read about the satanic glow 

emitted by bibles and newspapers.

Tomorrow I’ll study the mechanisms 

of the human hand. 

But the light surrounding is mysterious

and joy, physics, dance

are unsolved–

new books for a coming age.