Author: stevekuusisto

The following excerpt comes to us from Inclusion Daily:

S.E. Smith: Social Obstacles Are The Real Problem For Disabled People
(The Guardian)
September 24, 2010

FORT BRAGG, CALIFORNIA– [Excerpt] Reading obituaries, I am usually struck by a recurring narrative which often appears when high-profile people with disabilities die. Inevitably, the words “overcome” or “courage” crop up, often in the first line of the obituary — as seen in the case of Helen Keller, eulogized in the New York Times as a person who “overcame blindness and deafness” right in the opening line.

Christopher Reeve, the attorney Thomas Siporin and the baseball pitcher Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown (known as “three finger” after his disability) are also regularly referred to in those terms. The most recent example was Ian Cameron’s death last week, typified in this extract from an article in the Times: “Ian Cameron was determined not to be limited or defined by what he has always refused to call his disability.”

The term “in spite of their disabilities” is often used to describe successful disabled people, eliding the many factors that contribute to their success. Oddly enough, despite the assurance in the obituary that these individuals refused to be defined by their disabilities, their memorials often have the effect of reducing them, and their accomplishments, to their disabilities: they are role models and heroes because they had full lives while disabled.

Some of the high-profile disabled people dying today were born in an era when the disability rights movement was a far cry from what it is now, and thinking about disability was very much informed by 19th-century ideas. Disability was primarily perceived as a problem among war veterans; public accommodation for disabled people was minimal, and disabled children were deemed to be figures of tragedy. Had they been born into different families, their life stories might have been radically different.

Entire article:
Social obstacles are the real problem for disabled people
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/0924g.htm

Liberating Women With Disabilities
(ADAPT)
September 23, 2010

WASHINGTON, DC– [Excerpt] Today 300 ADAPT activists called on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to liberate women with disabilities from institutions by supporting the Community Choice Act. We covered all the entrances at 1st and Constitution NW in DC where Pelosi was receiving the Alice Paul award at a luncheon. Alice Paul was a first wave feminist leader and the annual award is sponsored by the Sewell Belmont House.

68.4 % of all nursing home residents are women. You can bet they would rather be in their own homes with services and supports. Most are seniors and women with disabilities and definitely not rich. These women are not exactly on Speaker Pelosi’s high priority list.

Sadly these women are also not high on the priority list of most feminists. All the women in ADAPT and many women with disabilities around the country were stoked about today’s action. Most of us are feminists and would love to build links to a women’s movement that, for the most part, ignores us.

What’s the story here? Women with disabilities are among the most excluded and oppressed in the country. One would think the women’s movement would be all over us. Not.

Entire article:
Liberating Women with Disabilities
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/0923f.htm
Related:
Action Reflection (ADAPT)
http://www.adapt.org/freeourpeople/2010dof/report05.php

Each day I wake and find that I'm still disabled, or I'm still a person with a disability or I'm still perceived as a person with a disability or what have you. It's very difficult in the crucial moments before rising from bed to absorb these poly-semous hieroglyphs and then, as I brush my teeth with Bryl Cream, or Neo-sporin it gets worse. And the day goes forward in all its steepnesses. Hundreds per day. The staring of strangers, worse than you can imagine. They think I don't know. And the multiple small indignities that accrue because of physical difference carry on all day like some kind of out of control adding machine. Tacka tacka tacka.

Grace is of course a spoiled idea in Christian terms as it implies forgiveness from God and when I think about disability I don't want any forgiveness.

I say these solid objects, the oak table, the poplars outside the window,
do not need forgiveness.

Grace is in the lines of your face.
People with disabilities think with their bones.

S.K.

I have been thinking about poetry, not as a delivery system for beauty but as a http://correspondent articulation of suspicion. By articulation I mean structure and the voicing of structure and by suspicion I mean the human distrust of cant or doctrine.

We could say that poets are likely to have the blues and few would argue the point. I think it was the poet Donald Hall who remarked that poets generally write from unhappiness. The blues are not just a cris de coeur but are also a structure of suspicion. Someone has done you wrong. Death has entered your house while you were eating your morning bread. Before this morning is over you’re going to have to dig a hole to put the devil in. We will have to dig a hole for the devil before noon.

Theorizing about poetry is often fruitless for beyond metaphors and their aptness or their cultural liabilities (outworn, tired, cliched) poetry is about suspicion. Poetry is rhythmic suspicion.

No one in his or her right mind would want to theorize suspicion.

Well, you say, that’s what Levi-Strauss did. And that’s what deconstruction is about.

But no. The language of curiosity and doubt is something you can analyze but you can’t theorize as you’re making it. The best you can do when making it is what we call articulation. You can be ironic, categorical, histrionic, wry, understated, sentimental, silly, or angry.

In its making, poetry is a resistance to theoretical impulses as surely as weeping is a resistance to the impersonal nature of human suffering.

This is why I cannot be a theorist.

Your theory and my blues are not of the same zoological exhibit.

S.K.

Third City In Missouri To Ban Harassment Of Wheelchair Users
(Kansas City Star)
September 22, 2010

INDEPENDENCE, MISSOURI– [Excerpt] Motorists of Independence: There will be no more harassment of people using wheelchairs.

Or riding bicycles. Or running. Or walking.

Anyone cited for such behavior runs the risk of a $500 fine and jail time.

Motorists harassing people using wheelchairs? Really?

Yes, really, said Schultz, an insurance agent who maintains an office just off Independence Square. He said he has seen occasional instances of motorists crowding wheelchair users as they tried to navigate crosswalks.

Entire article:
Independence bans harassment of others who share the road
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/0922d.htm

You might need a laugh today. Or else you’re so rich in laughter you’re a virtual Croesus of comedy in which case to hell with you. But for the rest of us who have dental floss stuck in our teeth or worn out shoes, a moment of levity tinged with polymathic irreverence is better than many pages of the Tao. (We wish Lao-tzu had a sense of humor.)

We urge you to watch Zach Anner as he takes us on a guided tour of Niagra Falls.  

Andrea Scarpino

Marquette, Michigan

Our apartment’s broad front windows look out over Marquette’s downtown—the Landmark Inn, the courthouse and post office, various old buildings housing apartments, businesses. I love eating my breakfast in our living room, watching the downtown come to life, the construction workers across the street sitting on concrete curbs to drink coffee. And then reading there at night, watching downtown darken, streetlights illuminate.

This summer, each day felt like two or three, we had light so long—at 11pm, I could still see across the city, see people walking home from the saloon next door. Last night, the sky was already dark by 8:00. The trees outside my windows are starting to change colors, pretty oranges on some of the leaves, yellow on others.

When I told friends in Lost Angeles we were moving to the Upper Peninsula, they often said something like, Good luck with the winter. Locals use words like bad weather, surviving and harsh. I’m not sure if they’re just trying to be honest, or if there’s a pride that comes with being able to survive months of snow, of cloudy skies, of freezing temperatures, a pride in that kind of heartiness. But I think to get through this first winter especially, I have to approach it with curiosity, excitement. If I live with a sense of dread, I’ll be miserable all winter. And miserable is not something I do well.

So here are my preparations: layering. This winter, I’m ignoring the price of clothes—I’m just buying them. After four years in Southern California, I literally own four long sleeve shirts. That has to change. Forget our normal clothing budget, forget my normal worries about consumption, this first year, I’m buying what I need to feel comfortable.

Vitamin D, which I’ve already started taking, and full spectrum light bulbs. I may still feel down this winter, may still suffer from a lack of the sunlight of which I’ve been accustomed, but hopefully these will make things manageable.

Winter sports. Cross country and downhill skiing, snowshoeing, skating. Although I love to run, treadmills bore me to tears after half an hour, and I’m not optimistic that I’ll be able to run outside for most of the winter. So skiing it will be. And I’m pretty excited. I haven’t skied since I lived in France eight years ago and although Marquette doesn’t have the Alps, we do have hundreds of miles of cross country trails, as well as a hill for downhill and snowboarding. I’m buying a season pass, my own equipment. I’m going to make it as easy as possible to get outside, relish the snowfall, relish the winter.

My LA yoga teacher said in class one day that we’re always asking for something else, something bigger, different, other than. Said that a radical act is loving what we have, not asking for things to be anything than they are. This quickly approaching winter, as the leaves continue changing colors, as the temperatures begin to drop, I’m going to practice the radical act of being in winter. Of loving it. Of looking out my front room windows each morning and imagining the possibilities only winter can unfold. This may take a lot of practice. But the alternative—misery, longing, counting the days till spring—is not something that interests me. So I’ll keep practicing.

Poet, essayist, and activist Andrea Scarpino can be visited at: www.andreascarpino.com

First you have to know our collective ages added up to 224 years which is to say we were old farts. Two of us were mathematicians, one was a writer. The noodle shop was a happy surrounding, a setting of comparatively satisfying healthy eating. If you were to wake up suddenly in the noodle shop on Dubuque St. in Iowa City you might think it was still 1970. It’s a place of frayed and edgy t shirt wearing lunchers. Everyone is looking for some calm and some vitamins. And there we were, the old farts, talking about the overly administrated university which seems to have more associate vice presidents and vice deans than the Vatican has nuncios, and as far as we old farts can tell, all this administrativia has no discernible bearing on the advancement of academic culture or of teaching. The old farts concluded that we are in a time of hieratic bloat even as they ate their noodles still believing in ideas. Silly old souls with chopsticks…

S.K.

Go young man and blog after long silence,
testing the waters
In your reindeer costume…

The following excerpted article comes to us from The Inclusion Daily Express.

The New Face Of Housing Discrimination
(Milwaukee News Buzz)
September 9, 2010
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN– [Excerpt] The topic of housing discrimination may conjure images of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, but more cases locally now involve prejudice against those with disabilities than racial bias, according to a recent report by the Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council. Often, the cases involve a bias against renting or selling to disabled people with animals trained to serve them.

Under state and federal laws, housing discrimination occurs when someone is denied equal opportunity to buy a home or rent an apartment. Wisconsin’s Open Housing Law, broader than the federal Fair Housing Act but lacking in teeth, many say, protects against discrimination based on sex, race, sexual orientation, disability, religion, national origin, marital status, family status (such as having children), source of income or age.

The nonprofit, a branch of the statewide Fair Housing Council, serves as the primary starting point for apartment or home seekers who feel they’ve been discriminated against in this metro area. It also investigates complaints and refers them to state and federal agencies. In 2009, the Council received 126 complaints of housing discrimination from the metro area. Disability was the leading type of complaint (40), followed by race (35) and sex (19).

Disability has risen in recent years to exceed complaints related to race, Wertheim says. She expects it will again in 2010. In 2008, when the Council took 151 complaints in the metro area, race ranked first (50), followed by disability (44) and familial status (19).

Entire article:
The new face of housing discrimination
http://www.milwaukeenewsbuzz.com/?p=237330