Author: stevekuusisto

The following excerpt from NPR comes to us via The Inclusion Daily Express. It’s interesting that in the article below NPR frames its prose with an interrogatory headline (“Rethinking ‘Retarded’: Should It Leave The Lexicon?”)as though there’s any question about the matter. In turn there are lots of questions but they are matters of cultural practice and diffusion and not matters of moral and ethical intelligence. (It’s not possible for instance to drive bad words out of the lexicon, they stick like burs.)  

I was a child who was called retarded on the terrible playgrounds of yesteryear. I remember this all too well. In my case I was legally blind and unable to play sports. Banned from conventional games I just walked around and endeavored to engage in thinking. Why not? Thinking is free. It is the only proven method for overthrowing the reality principle. So I used to walk around with that big red “R” on my back. Ugly names are a dread thing. And yes, they are hate speech. Children everywhere know how to sling it.

As Carl Jung wrote: “It is part of the business of growing up to listen to the fearful discords which real life grinds out and to include them among the images of reality. Truth and reality are assuredly no music of the spheres–they are the beauty and terror of Nature herself.”

The business of growing up invariably includes the apprehension of the ugliness around us. “The world is ugly and the people are sad,” (Wallace Stevens) and as Walter Cronkite used to say, “And that’s the way it is.”

But I remember that big red “R” on my back. The memory is a part of both my conscious and my unconscious life.

Like a bent over tree beside a lake I grew despite the wind. I took the “R” into my manifold images of reality. Its down in the psyche’s vault along with the “N” word and all the ugly “C” words and the images of bloody history.

Everyone does this. But storing bad thoughts is half of the matter. The healthy adult takes additional steps in life. One may call this step individuation if you’re an adept of psychoanalysis but it can also be called “leaving a space for the new” –for emotional growth requires space for new roots to grow. Jung again: “The psychic health of the adult individual, who in childhood was a mere particle revolving in a rotary system, demands that he should himself become the center of a new system.”

If you can’t drive out the terror of Nature you can talk about it.

I doubt if its possible to drive words out of the lexicon. Terror and avarice will cling to whatever we try to put in the vault. But we can talk about hate. And our public schools can do more in this regard. And adults who want to find new tools to grow with can talk about it.

S.K.

Rethinking ‘Retarded’: Should It Leave The Lexicon?
(National Public Radio)
September 14, 2009
UNITED STATES– [Excerpt] “Retarded” used to be a garden-variety insult, but it may be the next candidate for prime-time bleeping.

E. Duff Wrobbel never gave the word much thought — until his daughter was born with Down syndrome. When she was just a baby, Wrobbel was driving with her when another car cut them off.

“And I actually said that word,” says Wrobbel, who is a professor of speech communications. “And then I stopped my car and got teary. And I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I just said that.'”

Now, Wrobbel has joined other activists who campaign against the word “retard.” To them, it’s not a hilarious put-down; it’s hate speech.

Entire article:
Rethinking ‘Retarded’: Should It Leave The Lexicon?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112479383&ps=cprs
Related:
The “r” Word Campaign
http://therword.org

I wish to remind the Democrats that we elected them under the banner “Change We Can Believe In”. And let’s recall that spirit is always delivered by songs of justice. Justice, taken in spiritual terms differs from arbitrary and politically foreshortened arguments about fairness–the rich will always argue that paying more taxes is unfair; the unlettered will always argue that their poorer neighbors don’t deserve health care or surplus food, or bottled water or a rebuilt home following a tornado–false subjectivities are not the material of songs of justice. A Christian society should desire and strive for health care for all. And one may argue convincingly I think that a Christian society would not blanch from paying higher taxes so that the poor and the elderly and children in poverty and people with disabilities and wounded veterans are treated with due respect. The spirit understands spirit. The spirit knows higher justice and always, always knows when it is being bamboozled. The spirit isn’t swayed by roving bands of juvenile delinquents. The spirit has seen that stuff before. And so it keeps on singing, often in the dark. Redemption doesn’t mean that a burden is lifted, not always–sometimes it means that we carry more weight as Jesus did. It means we are called upon to carry our weaker brothers and sisters. It means democracy is hard. It means songs along the road. I know of no good songs about blue dog democrats. I do know a song about a singular dog named Blue. He was a good dog too. Blue was probably a guide dog. Funny how the small “d” democrats seem to need guidance. 

S.K.

The ancient Greeks grew weary of their gods and goddesses when the stories of Mount Olympus became hackneyed and too exhausting to bear. Religion can run out of gas when its symbols no longer speak to the people. And symbols run out of gas when they’re judged to have no good meaning for the majority of people.

The problem for human beings doesn’t reside in losing one’s faith. It’s possible to give up on the church and find a better calling by doing something that’s more meaningful in the civic world. The true problem is when human beings throw over the old symbols and fail to substitute them with better ones. This is often the case with human movements that celebrate demagoguery or that embrace tyranny. The Nazi’s threw out Christian symbolism and filled the void with pagan symbols, none of which represented divine love. The Russian Communists threw out Christian symbolism and replaced it with the ready made symbols of industrial manufacturing and history has showed the result.

I thought about this yesterday when I saw on TV a few short film clips of Tea Party protestors in Washington, all of them wearing 18th century tri-cornered hats and sporting vicious Tee shirts.  

One fair imagines that the protestors believe that tri-cornered hats evoke the promise of righteous 18th century colonial resentment over imperial taxation and at face value this is fine. But tri-cornered hats also represent an age and social order that embraced slavery, poverty in the streets, social alienation for women, near slavery for children, filth in the gutters, no access to higher education for the majority of citizens, vast illiteracy, and a host of absurd political and social ideas too numerous to mention here.

Frankly, sporting a tri-cornered hat is as bad as flying the Confederate flag–each act is symbolic of an age that should properly be foreign to us today. Beware what you throw away in your symbolic life. Perhaps the best symbol I know of when thinking about our national life is that of Jesus breaking a loaf of bread. I’d trust the Tea Party crowd a lot more if they wore big foam bread loaves on their noggins.

S.K.     

In the old days when Republicanism stood for business but not for the reactionary dissolution of the American state–as I say, in the old days if you were a liberal or a progressive or even a person from Mars, yes, in the old days one knew where one stood. The GOP (at least for most of the 20th century) was the party of main street values which meant at worst that it stood for business solely for the sake of business but at best it represented a deep respect for American values–particularly local values like good public libraries, freedom of speech, freedom of privacy, freedom of religion, and respect for our best ideals. These days one hears a good deal about the tilt of the Republicans toward the “hard right” or a new rightward extremism. No one on the talking heads television programs wants to use the word “fascism” but the advent of the Tea Party “cresco” (spirit of growth) signals something more than a fierce attachment to low taxes and a dizzying faith in big business, it represents faithlessness.      

It’s taken me a long time to understand the nature of this brand of disbelief for I grew up in an age of mainstream Republicans and while I didn’t always like their ideas I respected their love of our nation. One of the few things I liked about Richard Nixon when he ran for the presidency in 1968 was that he spoke about lawlessness and while his agenda was darker than we may have first supposed, he was speaking to the traditional American ideal of civil engagement instead of riots, arson, bomb throwing and the like. We are a great nation because we defend our diversity and our right to disagree and we resist anarchy and violence in that very defense.

As I say, it took me a long time to see that today’s hijacked GOP is more frightening and cynical than the unwashed anti Viet-Nam war crowd. Why this should be so has everything to do with their largely impoverished reading of Revelations. The new GOP has replaced the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution with a fractious wish for apocalypse. Enter Sarah Palin whose church in Wassila embraces a sense that the end of days is imminent. Enter the central idea of revelation that human truth is to be burned up in the everlasting bonfire. Revelation is not merely symbolism, its an enactment among its followers that this world must be overcome. And that overcoming is the abolition of everything in the reality principle: government, societies, flesh and blood, all the transitory things of the world.

If this is what you believe than truth is expendable. Civics. Health care. Cities and towns.

Finally, if this is what you believe, you don’t even care about the market place. This is why centrist Republicans, or quasi-centrist ones, cannot negotiate or conference.

The world of discourse is just another thing that will vanish in the bonfire of bonfires don’t you know?

It’s taken me a long time to understand the birthers, the tea party types, the secessionists, for I thought they had the same underlying optimism about America that I’ve always had. Of course I don’t believe in the end of the world.

S.K. 

By Jon Chopan

Columbus, Ohio

Her fingers are long and slim and exotic. I watch her for the first time as she prepares to tattoo someone. I am enchanted by how confidently she moves, like that first night we met, her high heel dangling from her foot as she sat on her front steps cross-legged, waiting for my arrival. Even then I noticed her hands, the way her wrist bent as she pulled her cigarette from her lips and blew smoke out at me. She said “Hello, Mr. Chopan,” like she had been sitting on that step, waiting for me for forever.

Months later I marvel at the way she fusses with her hands when she is working on a stencil. Tattooing is both something she is drawn to and something she loathes. It is art but it is work. And this is a kind of love she is practicing, a kind of attrition. I sit on the couch starring at her as she works the pencil deep into the paper, making the lines solid, smooth. She fiddles with her hair and mouths the eraser from time to time. I think about how her hands reveal so much about her mind, how I know her worry or excitement by their movement.  They are, when she is excited, like humming birds flashing at her sides.  Then to I am reminded of that first night when she pushed me into her bed. “It is so strange finally having you here,” she said. She pinned me there and looked down at me, as if I were a hostage she was toying with, and I could feel the strength in every finger as they held me tightly against escape.

What I mean to say about hands, about this woman’s hands, is how important they are to me, to my memory of her. I have always, because my father is a carpenter, believed that there is something sacred about the hands, that in them there is the sorrow and sacrifice of a lifetime. When she tattoos for long stretches her hands cramp and I want very desperately to hold them, to rub them, to make them feel soft and human again. But too, secretly, I like them worn, I like the smooth hard spots where her tools have flattened and hardened the flesh.  I feel at home when she presses them against me, warm and worn after a day of work. The very power of her creation still charged in the joints and creases of her fingers.

I never told her, not when she was with me anyhow, how much I loved her hands. I would, some days, when we were lying in bed, press them to my chest and trace her bones. Maybe I knew then that she would go off to another place and leave me. But now I sit, looking at a photograph of her playing with a camera. I see her fingers searching it out, crawling over every inch, like they did when we said goodbye for the last time.  She traced my cheekbones as if she might be able, just through touch, to remember me like that. I am looking at her hands and I am sixteen-year-old boy again, learning what it means to love, learning how the body, which is built so much like a machine, feels pain in ways that can only be explained as phantom. That is, this longing I feel, it is not the sharp sting of tearing flesh or the quick snap of broken bone, it is a slow ripple starting at the center and moving outward with no end in sight.

Jon Chopan received his MFA in Creative Nonfiction writing from The Ohio State University and he currently lives in Columbus, Ohio. He is the Midwest Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit him at: www.pulledfromtheriver.com

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

S.K.  

Judge Orders Abercrombie & Fitch To Pay For Discriminating Against Teen Customer
(Star-Tribune)
September 10, 2009
ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA– [Excerpt] A judge ordered retail giant Abercrombie & Fitch to pay $115,000 for discriminating against a 14-year-old autistic customer at its Mall of America store.

The civil penalty, the largest of its kind in at least two years, came four years after store employees refused to let the autistic teen join her older sister in a fitting room because of the clothing chain’s anti-shoplifting policy. The store refused to relent even after the sister, and later the girls’ mother, explained that the 14-year-old couldn’t be alone because of her disability.

The confrontation humiliated the girl, who testified that the incident made her feel like a “misfit.”

“She was singled out and required to hear her sister and mother repeatedly ask for accommodations based on her disability, in front of a long line of customers, at a store that markets itself to young people as a purveyor of a particularly desirable ‘look'” administrative law judge Kathleen D. Sheehy declared in her ruling.

Entire article:
Abercrombie & Fitch fined in MOA discrimination case
http://www.startribune.com/local/57832702.html
Related:
Abercrombie and Fitch fined for discrimination against girl with autism (Minnesota Public Radio)
http://tinyurl.com/nwwbvm

By Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

Zac and I will have been together nine years in October, and while most of our friends know we’re not going to get married, we still get the occasional question about having children. My answer changes depending on my mood. If I don’t really want to talk about it, I may say something non-committal like, We definitely don’t want kids now, but maybe sometime in the future. If I’m feeling feisty, I’ll step up on my soap box and talk about how there are already 6 billion people on the Earth and that adding more just doesn’t make sense environmentally or socially or politically. . . you get the idea.

But the truth of the matter is that I’ve always figured a child would come into my life when and if she needed to—just like my various pets. I was always the kid who brought home any creature that looked like it needed some love, which means I’ve sheltered a snapping turtle, an injured songbird, rabbits, baby geese (that we put in the bathtub), frogs and snakes, fish that I won at a fair, several dogs and one very loud cat (whom we named Kato after OJ Simpson’s famous houseguest. The cat showed up, was ridiculously handsome and immediately fell asleep in my lap. I was hooked, even though he has never again sat on my lap since we let him move in five years ago). I always figured a child would show up in a similar fashion.

And children have come into my life through my friends, who seem to be birthing more and more every day, and most recently, through my brother, who just moved back to the US with his wife and step-daughter. Now I know I’m biased, but it’s pretty clear that my niece is the cutest little girl in the world. She’s five years old (six years old in Korea because Koreans count newborns as already having lived a year—all that time in the womb should count for something) and she’s still learning English, but she is a firecracker.

Playing with her, I think about how cool it is that my niece seems interested in being with me—that we’re choosing each other, not because I birthed her but because it’s fun to hang out with each other. I know this isn’t entirely a choice, of course—she didn’t just walk up my driveway and ask for love like Kato did—but there’s something extra special about the fact that we found each other. That her mother and my brother fell in love and got married, that they moved to the US for graduate school, that I have this little person around who reminds me so much of myself when I was little. When I’m with my niece, I feel vindicated that my faith has paid off, that there are already so many kids in the world, a few will find me when they’re ready.

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

The following excerpted article comes to us from The Inclusion Daily Express. We who live in Iowa and advocate for people with disabilities won’t go away either.

S.K.

Glenwood Tops Care Facilities In State Fines
(Des Moines Register)
September 8, 2009
GLENWOOD, IOWA– [Excerpt] A state-run home for the disabled has racked up more state fines over the past year than any other Iowa care facility.

Between July 2008 and July 2009, the Glenwood Resource Center was fined $52,500 for inadequate resident care – more than any of the 710 other care facilities, public and private, in Iowa.

The home is managed by the Iowa Department of Human Services, the agency that is largely responsible for serving and protecting the disabled.

Another DHS-managed facility has racked up the third-highest set of fines over the past year – the Woodward Resource Center, Glenwood’s central-Iowa sister facility. Woodward was recently cited for leaving a disabled resident strapped to a toilet for 40 minutes.

Meanwhile, Gov. Chet Culver’s office has refused to make public a draft copy of a report from an independent consultant on the conditions at Glenwood, which has been under federal scrutiny for a decade.

Entire article:
Glenwood tops care facilities in state fines
http://tinyurl.com/npsh73
Related:
Deaths in Iowa Institutions (Inclusion Daily Express Archives)
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/institutions/ia/iowa.htm

The story and the video link below come to us from Dave Reynold’s Inclusion Daily Express and (as always) we are grateful to him for his watchfulness and persistence as he monitors the press for stories by or about persons with disabilities.

Reading this I’m reminded of Carl Jung’s observation that “nature, as we know is not so lavish with her boons that she joins to a high intelligence the gifts of the heart also.”

Of course even the smallest minded persons have high intelligence. That’s why these stories are so painful…

S.K.

Town Hall Hecklers Shout Down Woman Who Calls For Compassion On Health Care
By Dave Reynolds, Inclusion Daily Express
September 3, 2009
RED BANK, NEW JERSEY–Marianne Hoynes read a prepared statement from her wheelchair during a town hall meeting last week, urging her Congressman to support health care reform.

What made national news, however, wasn’t her message, but the noise from those in the crowd who tried to drown out her voice.

“This country is a completely different place to live in when you get sick,” she read into a microphone.

Hoynes, who said she has two incurable auto-immune diseases, implored Democratic Representative Frank Pallone to consider our fellow Americans that do not have health care coverage.

“I worked hard my whole life and my house is bought and paid for,” Hoynes explained.

And, even though she has Medicare, “the copay for one of my medications is $389 every two weeks. And I’m afraid I won’t be able to afford my property taxes and I’ll lose my home.”

“Please hear this voice of the disabled. Don’t let the insurance lobby win this fight.”

“We all need reasonable health care coverage to be a basic human right, not a privilege.”

Throughout her statement, opponents of health care reform are heard loudly laughing, booing and yelling at her.

One of the loudest hecklers later told a reporter, “I don’t know how a handicapped woman in a chair has more rights than I do.”

Related:
Video of Statement From Marianne Hoynes (YouTube)
http://tinyurl.com/l2zqx4

By Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

You may have heard that Los Angeles is burning to the ground. And it kind of is: 130,000 acres have already burned. Where I live, the fires mostly mean tall plumes of gray and white smoke rolling down the hills, ash on the cars and air that makes my lungs ache.

I have spent the past few days of fire reading Zac’s work. He’s in the final stages of completing a Ph.D. in philosophy, and needed to send a significant chunk of his dissertation to his committee this week. So I read each chapter, writing comments about clarity, adding commas that I might have deleted in an earlier draft, making big red question marks everywhere I got lost. This is what I do for a living, after all: read unfinished work and try to help it be as strong as it can be.

With Zac, though, I’m afraid I’m not a very good teacher. I don’t know the literature within which he works, so I ask stupid questions, move sentences around because I want them to sound better, push him for clarity that another philosopher probably wouldn’t need. Twice, this week, I asked him to rewrite sections of his dissertation as if he were writing for an audience of six-year olds. Degrading? Maybe. But the clarity of his rewriting was much improved. Multiple times, I asked him to talk me through what he was trying to write in a particular section, and as he talked, I said, Write that down! And that. He complained that he had already made those points clear, but since I didn’t understand them, I made him write them down again anyway.

Philosophers are taught to think of themselves as practicing the master doctrine. A Ph.D., after all, is a Philosophy Doctorate; no matter if your degree is in English or History or French, if you have a Ph.D., your degree contains the word “philosophy.” Zac is the most humble philosopher I’ve ever met, but I still don’t think he’s the biggest fan of printing a chapter for me that he thinks is complete, only to have it returned with grammatical corrections and question marks in red pen (no one thinks of poetry as the master doctrine, by the way, but I firmly believe the world would be a better place if we did). So we talked and defended our positions. Sometimes I conceded, sometimes he did.

And as fire raged around the city, we engaged in the fine pursuits of philosophy and writing, of writing philosophy, of philosophizing the written word. I hope Zac’s dissertation will be stronger because of my critiques. I hope his committee will see the brilliance in his thinking. Mostly though, I hope we have many more weeks like this one, arguing over intuitions and examples, points of clarity, the ordering of paragraphs. I hope we can always argue philosophy and writing without taking our arguments or each other too seriously. And I hope that we remember, when the fires are burning outside our doors, to hunker down and think seriously about the world.

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com