Category: Disability Perspectives

My fellow disability rights blogger, Moggy, brought this to my attention today.

In a recent Slate Magazine obituary of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, writer and composer Matthew Guerrieri absent-mindedly notes that the composer’s disabled mother was “euthanized” by the Nazis. I am choosing to think of Mr. Guerrieri as “absent-minded” rather than being overtly insensitive or worse. Beginning with the infamous T4 project (which was launched on the same day Hitler invaded Poland) the third Reich rounded up people with disabilities and forcibly removed them to state hospitals where they were subsequently gassed. The term for this is “execution” and not “euthanasia” and one would like to imagine that a talented composer like Mr. Guerrieri knows the difference.

German construction workers are still today finding the mass graves of people with disabilities whose remains were buried in the woods behind the hospitals.

Murder will out.

Perhaps you may be wondering why I labor over such a dark subject on this Christmas Eve?

The most obvious answer is that people with disabilities are still struggling for their rights all over the globe. As with all human rights struggles the language we employ really matters.

There is a lot of “ableism” out there in normative society where the temporarily abled imagine that physical perfection is the sine qua non of true life. Ableists think that “the disabled” are living lives of quiet desperation.

In turn, I’m a big fan of the organization Not Dead Yet which fights to make certain that the general public understands that people with disabilities are living rewarding lives, even in the face of the physical and emotional challenges that accompany so many disabilities. 

Although I am essentially a left of center Democrat I sided with President George W. Bush when he attempted to rally Congress in the defense of Terry Schiavo who, as you will recall, was slowly starved to death under the banner of “euthanasia”.

I will never forget that Adolph Hitler called people with disabilities “useless eaters” and I’ll never forget that we have an unjust medical care system in the U.S. which routinely denies appropriate and necessary medical care to the poor.

I can’t use the words euthanasia and disability in a paratactic way. I think that ableist assumptions about the lives of the disabled and the social inequities that surround disability are terrifying.

I suppose you could say I’m having a “blue Christmas” like those folks who were featured this morning on NPR. They ran a story today on “Morning Edition” about an Episcopal church in Washington, DC where the pastor has created a Christmas service for people who are experiencing real grief during the holidays. My hat’s off to those folks. People of conscience feel the pain of life on this blue planet, and for sensitive souls the terrible holiday music and commodified cheer is especially hard to take.

But really, I mean it: I’m not having a blue Christmas. I just want to share the expectation that human rights are supported without exception today and always.

And as Tiny Tim would say: “God bless us, one and all.”

S.K.

Lately I have been endeavoring to send letters of recommendation to colleges and universities across the U.S. on behalf of students who are applying to graduate schools.

I only write letters for those students whose work and preparation will make them successful graduate students and accordingly the process of writing these letters is fairly pleasant. (It feels good to say that Casper Hauser will be a credit to the profession, whatever that profession might be. He has, after all, come a long way from the feral state that characterized his former days.)

The "thing" that does not feel good is the relative inaccessibility of the various online recommendation websites that some of these colleges and universities are now using.

If you use screenreading software for the blind you will be able to access some of these sites, but others are largely inaccessible.

Well that’s no big deal. After all, stores like Target have resisted making their websites accessible for years. Even when there isn’t some kind of organized hostility to electronic or digital accessibility, there’s a cluelessness and systemic inattention to accessibility in all kinds of areas that intersect with higher education. I could go on and on about this topic but I need to maintain my equilibrium today.

Two of these online recommendation sites have form fields that screenreading software can’t engage and when you write the "help" line you actually get an e-mail that asks you to enter your problem in another inaccessible place.

I hold my head. I spit gently into my hanky and proceed.

S.K.

There’s a poem I particularly like by Robert Bly entitled “Eleven O’clock at Night” in which the poet lies down in his bed and wonders about the usefulness of his day. Bly asks the all important question: “What did I accomplish today?”

Some years ago I found a sermon, written by my paternal grandfather—it was in Finnish but the title in translation was: “What Does God Ask of You Now?”

I was only 19 or so when I found that sermon and after translating the title I scoffed. “What a silly, old fashioned and entirely dark sensibility,” I thought. I was “hip” after all, and accordingly I was filled with adolescent despair and a lot of bad ideas from the sixties including “don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

My Finnish grandfather was an immigrant to the United States. He was a Lutheran minister and he offered church services in rural Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and in his later years to the Finns who worked in the leather tanning factories and quarries in Massachusetts.

I have recently heard civic officials in more than one American city say in public that providing basic services to people who have disabilities is too difficult. I won’t name the towns and I won’t disclose the identities of the Babbit-like city council types—at least not for now. There are plenty of blockheads on the planet’s surface and I’ll risk carpal tunnel if I start typing their names.

My point in this instance is that providing special education to kids in our public schools, or putting in accessible curb cuts are no longer “choices” in the old-fashioned sense—at least the Americans with Disabilities Act says so.

Yet all over America (and even in relatively prosperous towns) one sees and hears a kind of adopted scarcity rhetoric when it comes to the provision of basic civil rights.

Here’s how the thinking that I’m alluding to actually works:

Continue reading “The Easy Things”

Nowadays its customary to hear people talking all the
time about “transitioning” much in the way they used to talk about “flossing” or
“dating”—you can hear people say, “I’m transitioning right now,” as if they’re
actually undergoing a metamorphosis. The reformation of transition into a verb
carries with it the implicit assumption that transitioning is a good thing. One
doesn’t say, “I’m transitioning from the Titanic to a lifeboat,” or, “I’m
transitioning from heroin to methadone.” Transitioning implies
forethoughtfulness and purpose.

I think that people with disabilities are so busy making
a “go” of their situation that they seldom have time to say they’re
transitioning. As a blind person I don’t say that I’m transitioning down the
street, though I probably could. The trouble is, I’m too busy trying to get
somewhere and get there in one piece and avoid walking into street lamps or
dumpsters to feel that I’m transitioning my way down the sidewalk.

But I want to be one of those transitioning people. So here’s my plan:

I’m transitioning from being a young blind person to being an older blind person. I don’t care so much anymore what other people think about my physical difference. I’m just me.

S.K.