Author: stevekuusisto

Red Sox legend Johnny Pesky dies

http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/2012/08/13/red-sox-legend-johnny-pesky-dies/4FIyv55aZMCrkTUhkQTsTO/story?s_campaign=MobAppShare_EM

Stephen Kuusisto
Director
The Renee Crown University
Honors Program
University Professor
Syracuse University

http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/new-syracuse-transit-hub.html

Posted with Blogsy

My mother fed caramels to the squirrels.

She didn’t like her own mother. She didn’t like people very much. She claimed to like animals.

Strictly speaking this shouldn’t concern you. You have your own troubles. It is likely that you want to clean up the garden, burn the old plantings, maybe talk to your cat about Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound who tried to paint Paradise on the inside of his eyelids.

We are all students of doubtfulness and of its moods.

Unlike my mother I tend to enjoy people. I’ve been known to bake bread and leave it on the doorsteps of near strangers. This is no joke. I bake good bread. I listen to Verdi while working the dough.

Ah but now in middle age I find I’m cut off on the inside. And though I can stand in a room and smile, tell a joke, sing a homemade song, even so, standing before the tall glass of my life, there under that moon I am lonely.

I am in no way singular because of it. The man across the street who is picking the last tomatoes of the summer is lonely. The woman I met this morning who teaches linguistics at the university is lonely. My friends, my wife, all my relatives are quietly alone though we are trained to withhold this even from the psychiatrist or the priest.

The poet William Carlos Williams said in one of his poems “I am lonely. I am best so.” I remember reading those words as a college sophomore and I felt the proper fit in my soul.

The feeling of estrangement is not a social matter as the boy or girl would imagine. The “difference” as Emily Dickinson wrote “is internal, where the meanings are.”

Our human souls are needy as empty pockets. They are thirsty as flesh itself but this condition cannot be quenched with drink or a good home in a nice neighborhood.

Now the full moon rises and as the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca wrote: “the heart feels it is a little island in the infinite.”

Make no mistake every heart is in a condition of static or pure loneliness. This is why Jesus said to his disciples: “My father’s house has many mansions. If it were not so, I would not tell you.”

Of all the lines in the New Testament those are for me, the most comforting. This is according to my soul. My soul, that forlorn intelligence hugging my tissues and bones. My soul that cannot get used to life. That insists on sleeplessness so that together we can work out the geometry of mutual being in our common and threshed hours.

Once I harvested the last sunflowers of autumn because the frost was coming.

I did this with some friends.

We brought half living, stately sunflowers into an old house and we propped them against the hearth. We sang songs and drank wine. Unspoken? Every one of us had Lorca under his or her ribs and we could, it turned out, give our souls a warm room and some fading flowers.

My mother died without knowing this feeling of shy, unasked for communion. I think her story is legion.

John Donne writes in one of his elegies:

“Xerxes’ strange Lydian love, the platane tree,
Was loved for age, none being so large as she ;
Or else because, being young, nature did bless
Her youth with age’s glory, barrenness.”

Surely the aim of living is to craft a fruitful spirit.

Not long ago I discovered a boy jumping on discarded bedsprings on a Chicago sidewalk. He was making a stripped down music from solitude and trash. It was the song of a woodcutter’s axe in the empty woods. He saw me listening. He sensed an audience. He threw everything he had into making rare music with ruined steel coils and shoes. He was releasing invisible spirits into the morning air of Wabash. Avenue.

At first I thought his effect was obscene. The bed springs sounded like the furtive, metallic groans of forgotten trysts. I thought of a bordello in the Wild West. I laughed at the salty bravado of the performance. Then I saw flashes of light. The broken springs flashed like the undersides of leaves. His bed springs were tuned in harmony with the sky and the local trees.

I saw sparks—heard 16th notes; 8th notes; the found music and electrolysis of dance…

He was dancing at the epicenter of first light—that overcast sun that always hangs in the mornings above Lake Michigan.

Then he was in an island of trees. Low notes came suddenly: the notes signified a bent path. The way forward was harder for some reason. The dance had taken a darker turn. I could tell this was now a steep narrative. Somehow he’d figured out how to make the springs sound like a tuba. Then he made the metal groan like a cello.

I remembered that as a boy in Naples, Enrico Caruso sang in the streets. When he made a little money he would eat a blood orange sorbet outside the café Risorgimento. They called this dessert the “frozen sunset” –a dish of scarlet juice and ice, misted with lemon.

I like to imagine the scene: the boy and future tenor singing love songs to the fiancée of a very rotund man from Caserta. “Only a boy can carry my heart,” said the fat man to his beloved. “Boys are still sweet as the baby Jesus!” Then I picture him clapping his hands the way impresarios do: a fleshy sound of exaggeration.

And surely the girl was embarrassed. This was a street urchin, a boy in a dirty shirt. A child hired to sing love songs! This thing was a joke! But there on the via Carraciola in the din of carts and boats and street hustlers the boy sang Bellini’s Ma rendi pur contento his black eyes shining with joy and concentration so that passersby stood still. Two men, twin brothers from Rome stopped eating their sugared almonds. There in the heat of the day in that unforeseen place was a prodigy. What could surpass the unassuming purity of such a child’s voice?

The boy performed as if the edge of his heart was catching flame.

The fat man from Caserta was delighted and bobbed his head like a pheasant, then strutted, ruffled his feathers. His fiancée tipped her head in wonder, her features softening, a portrait reversing to a sketch. Her enormous hat with its absurd ribbons could not hide the smile.

Then the boy sang Bella Nice, che d’amore, his hands stretched out, palms up, without irony. Could anything be this sweet again? Vin santo and peaches? Cloves in the boiled sugar?

The boy Caruso and the hot Neapolitan day were working together, visioning ice, ice on the fat lip of a hungry lover.

**

The kid on the bedsprings spoke with his feet, said: there’s no iridescent glow of escape beyond the dancing and you got to hear it for yourself.

This is the secret of growing old profitably in spirit. We can do this.

Posted with Blogsy

For Immediate Release: August 9, 2012

Media Contacts: Chris Hilderbrant, 585-267-0343

    Stephanie Woodward, 585-269-9184

Disability Activists Secure Agreement from RIT President After Protesting Local Hotel’s Resistance to Equal Access

Rochester, NY – In response to national efforts by the hotel industry to block full accessibility to swimming pools for Americans with disabilities, local disability rights activists took action today to protest against a local member of the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AH&LA). The protest was coordinated by Rochester ADAPT, in collaboration with disability rights activists across the nation. The action took place in Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) President Bill Destler’s office, and was focused on the RIT Inn & Conference Center’s failure to give a firm commitment to make its swimming pools accessible to people with disabilities.

After making the group’s grievances clear and after a very constructive conversation with President Destler, the group of disability rights activists secured a firm commitment that the RIT Inn & Conference Center has ordered permanent lifts for its pool, and that the lifts will be installed immediately after they arrive on campus. RIT will also ask the manager of the inn to examine AH&LA’s role in resisting the installation of permanent lifts in pools across the country, and to examine the inn’s relationship with AH&LA.

On September 15, 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice published updated Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) regulations. The regulations required pools operated by hotels and other public entities to become accessible by March 15, 2012, unless to do so would not be readily achievable. As the implementation deadline approached earlier this year, the hotel industry and its lobbyists at the AH&LA fought hard to extend the deadline, therefore prolonging pool access for Americans with disabilities. The Department of Justice has extended the deadline to January 31, 2013. Despite this extension, the hotel industry continues to fight against full access to pools for people with disabilities.

In July, disability rights activists across the nation began a boycott of hotels and chains which do not have pools with permanent lifts that make pools fully accessible to all paying guests. Today’s action in Rochester is the first local direct action in the nation against a hotel with an inaccessible pool, though more are planned. “This is about more than pools,” said Bruce Darling, organizer with ADAPT. “This action marks the beginning of the next phase in a campaign to protect the ADA. Hotels can expect this to be a guerilla campaign. They won’t know where we are going, but they’ll definitely know when we’re there!”

The RIT Inn & Conference Center is represented on the board of AH&LA and, given that RIT is the home to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, ADAPT and its allies across the country have asked RIT to take a leadership role in fighting for equal access to hotel facilities for all Americans, regardless of physical ability.

###

ADAPT is a national grass-roots community that organizes disability rights activists to engage in nonviolent direct action, including civil disobedience, to assure the civil and human rights of people with disabilities to live in freedom. See more about ADAPT and ADAPT’s work at www.adapt.org.

Some years ago I was asked to make a few comments at the mayor’s mansion in New York City. The occasion was a fund raiser for Guiding Eyes for the Blind and the mayor was Rudolph Giuliani. This was a long time ago, now, 14 years give or take a few minutes. 

On the way to the mayor’s residence I was denied a taxi ride because of my guide dog. This is nothing new to people with disabilities–cab drivers will avoid you because they don’t want the hassle of your wheelchair or they don’t want your dog in their cab. Maybe they think we all have cooties. No matter, despite laws that should guarantee us equal access we’re screwed all the time in the taxicab roulette. 

At the ceremony with Mayor Giuliani I quoted some lines by the Spanish poet Unamuno: “We die of cold and not of darkness.” That is, in effect, in my interpretation, it’s cultural ostracism that kills people and not the lack of light. 

The current mayor of New York has shown tremendous disdain for the disability community in the city–saying that people in wheelchairs who want accessible cabs maybe ought to stay home. (His precise quote escapes me now, but that’s pretty much the ticket.) 

Simi Linton and a group of wheelchair users in NYC have been fighting to make sure that all cabs in the city are wheelchair accessible, which means among other things that they’d be accessible for baby strollers and scooters and steamer trunks. The fact that the mayor doesn’t like this idea doesn’t change the fact that accessible cabs should be on the streets. I’ve walked with Simi in New York and I know how hard it is for wheelchair users to get around. Yesterday Simi and friends were arrested for blocking traffic outside Gracie Mansion.

Back to Unamuno. 

I was denied entry to a restaurant in New York City not long ago. The doorman didn’t want my guide dog in his establishment. We’ve since resolved the matter and the staff will be having training on the ADA next week. 

But I don’t think its an exaggeration to say that public attitudes can be shaped by people at the top. Fish stinks from the head. Isn’t it easier to send people with disabilities packing or haul them off to jail for protesting than to honor the spirit of community? Mayor Bloomberg is a cynic and a boor. And he’s on the wrong side of history. 

(Huffington Post)
August 9, 2012

STRATFORD, NEW JERSEY– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] The 3-year-old girl who sparked a national debate over whether “mental retardation” should be grounds for denying a patient an organ transplant, will receive a new kidney.

Amelia Rivera was initially denied the transplant by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia because the same genetic disorder that caused her kidneys to fail also left her severely cognitively impaired, and unable to walk or talk. While she would die without a transplant, doctors originally said, a cascade of other health problems might well shorten her life even with one. The decision was made to not place her on the organ recipient list.

Her parents argued that this was tantamount to discrimination based on her mental capabilities. They never asked that Amelia receive an organ from a stranger but did not understand why she could not receive one from a relative, known as a designated donation. After they took their plea to the internet, and more than 50,000 signed a Change.org petition and joined #TeamAmelia on Twitter, the hospital agreed that family and friends could be tested to find a match.

On the website of WolfHirschorn.org — the support group for the syndrome that Amelia has — her mother, Chrissy, announced yesterday that she would be her daughter’s donor.

Entire article:
Amelia Rivera, Girl Who Sparked Debate Over Transplants And ‘Mental Retardation’, To Receive New Kidney From Mom
http://tinyurl.com/ide0809121a
Related:
With Transplant Approved by Hospital, Amelia Rivera’s Mom to Donate Kidney (Babble.com)
http://tinyurl.com/ide0809121b
Kidney Chronicles Part Three (Blog Post by Chrissy Rivera)
http://wolfhirschhorn.org/2012/08/amelia/kidney-chronicles-part-three/

(New York Times)
August 9, 2012

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] Students with disabilities are almost twice as likely to be suspended from school as nondisabled students, with the highest rates among black children with disabilities.

According to a new analysis of Department of Education data, 13 percent of disabled students in kindergarten through 12th grade were suspended during the 2009-10 school year, compared with 7 percent of students without disabilities. Among black children with disabilities, which included those with learning difficulties, the rate was much higher: one out of every four was suspended at least once that school year.

The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California, Los Angeles, conducted the study of data from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which originally released the raw statistics in March.

Policy makers and civil rights leaders worry about out-of-school suspensions because they often presage dropouts and can raise a child’s risk of future incarceration. Districts with high suspension rates also tend to be correlated with lower student achievement as measured by test scores.

The analysis, which reviewed data at the state and district levels, found that in 10 states, including California, Connecticut, Delaware and Illinois, more than a quarter of black students with disabilities were suspended in 2009-10. In Illinois, the rate was close to 42 percent, compared with about 8 percent for white students.

Entire article:
Suspensions Are Higher for Disabled Students, Federal Data Indicate
http://tinyurl.com/ide0809123a
Related:
State schools suspend students at higher rates than average, study finds (Los Angeles Times)
http://tinyurl.com/ide0809123b

There’s a quote by the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky that I’ve always loved:

“Love’s boat has been shattered against the life of everyday. You and I are quits, and it’s useless to draw up a list of mutual hurts, sorrows, and pains.”

I have lately begun to think of this in relation to the United States. You and I are quits, for I don’t recognize a country where stepping on the necks of the poor is considered acceptable. 

Listen Old Thing, you shattered your constitution and threw away your moral chemise.

And Thorstein Veblen and Walt Whitman are probably drunk in the afterlife. 

Our friend Andrea Scarpino brought this blog post by Phillipa Willits to our attention. Ms. Willitts writes about the slew of disability inspiration advertisements and images that are currently going around in cyber-land, portraits of cheery disabled people overcoming their afflictions because they have fabulous attitudes. The idea that you can overcome a disability with a “fab” attitude is reductionist and of course just too easy. Here’s a quote we like:

“What’s more, as long as non-disabled people can happily dismiss disability as a matter of attitude, they then have no need to start tackling the real causes of disability such as inaccessibility and discrimination. That disabled woman who complained because she couldn’t attend your inaccessible meeting? She’s just got a bad attitude! A good attitude would presumably have magicked up a ramp and large-print leaflets.”

From our good friend Scott Lissner at Ohio State University:

I would like to encourage   you to support the National Forum on Disability Issues.  The nonpartisan forum is the only event of its kind where the Presidential Candidates are invited to share their public policies which affect the 54 million people with disabilities in the United States.

The National Forum will be held on September 28, 2012 in Columbus Ohio and will also be webcast live across the country. (Note, since this event is held in Ohio the two Ohio candidates for U.S. Senate have also been invited to participate.) To date, there are more than 50 co-sponsors of the event, mostly national disability organizations. Attached are invitations sent to the Presidential Candidates, a current list of sponsors and a FAQ.  Beyond promoting the event and possible sponsorship you can encourage others to write, e-mail or call the Campaign offices of President Obama, Governor Romney telling them:

• You hope they will demonstrate their commitment by personally participating the forum instead of sending their staff
• You hope they will address both broad disability issues (Education, Employment, Transportation, health care, Social Security…) as well as (list issues important to you such as financial aid supporting students with disabilities,  accessible textbooks,  captioning, universal design…) that are particularly important to me. 

To contact the campaigns:

•             Obama: http://www.barackobama.com/contact-us/call-write

•             Romney: http://www.mittromney.com/forms/other

You can contact  Susan Hetrick for more details on sponsorship or the event.   

Susan Hetrick

Director of Public Policy/The Ability Center

Coordinator/Ohio Disability Vote Coalition

614-575-8055

866-575-8055 (toll free)