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I am sending this message along to you both as a personal supporter of the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilites (CRPD) and as representative of The Association on Higher Education And Disability (AHEAD) which supports the Convention as well. 

While it does require anything beyond the ADA here in the US, I believe the CRPD has the potential to facilitate international travel, business opportunities and markets for individuals with disabilities as well as expanding options for study abroad international exchanges of students and scholars that are so critical for tomorrow’s education and economy. 

I know the CRPD will improve the experience of disability for literally millions of people across the globe.

I know the CRPD will not undercut US sovereignty and that calling your senator will send a message that as an individual and a country we recognize that disability is an inextricable part of human experience and that all of us should be treated with fairness and dignity.  

The CRPD was considered by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week (Thursday, 7/12), with testimony by several disability rights’ advocates.  As a result, the CRPD has been moved to “mark-up,” which is the final step before the committee votes to send the CRPD to the Senate floor for a vote on ratification.  The CRPD is scheduled for mark-up on Thursday, July 19.

As you will see from the message below, there are several powerful groups lobbying against the ratification of the CRPD.  As they step up their efforts, those of us in favor of ratification need to step up ours.  AHEAD is urging its members to contact their Senators, to identify themselves as a constituent and a member of the Association on Higher Education and Disability.  I encourage you to consider similar action, regardless of your affiliation with AHEAD.  Call your Senator and Indicate that you support ratification of the CRPD and urge them to ask their colleagues on the Foreign Relations Committee to send the CRPD to the Senate floor so that they can vote in favor of ratification.  If your Senator sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, ask him or her to send the CRPD to the Senate floor and then vote for ratification. 

You may find contact information for your Senators by visiting:

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm   

Please email or call your Senators today. 

Begin forwarded message from Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund:

UPDATE! Lastweek’s warm reception in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was good for us, but it provoked a storm of calls from the opposition led by the Homeschool Legal Defense Association and Rick Santorum. Rick Santorum has a large following and he’s using Twitter, Facebook and his substanial email list to provoke opposition and it’s working.We need to raise our voices in determined response!

MESSAGE: Identify yourself and your connection to disability (person with a disability, parent of a child with a disability, family member, etc.) then tell your Senator that,I support ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and as your constituent I request that you support the CRPD at the Committee meeting on July 19, vote in favor of the treaty in Committee, and move it forward to a floor vote in the Senate!

CONTACT:

Chairman: Senator John Kerry (D-MA)

(202) 224-4651

Chief counsel: Andrew Keller andrew_keller@foreign.senate.gov OR

www.kerry.senate.gov/contact/

Ranking Member: Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN)

(202) 224-6797

Chief counsel: Michael Mattler michael_mattler@foreign.senate.gov OR

www.lugar.senate.gov/contact/

This morning in my email comes an offer from Orbitz: “Las Vegas four star hotels from $29.  I’d rather have five root canals than go to Vegas. Okay. I’m glad I got that off my chest. 

And I would rather have five root canals than go to Amityville, NY on a ghost tour. No more ersatz fright. 

And I would rather have five root canals than listen to country music. As Leadbelly said famously: “Never was no white person had the blues.”

White people have depression, then they go to Vegas or like me, they take something made by big pharma. 

And I’d rather have five root canals than watch tv advertisements by big pharma.

Anything else? 

I’m tired of neo-liberals talking about neo-liberalism. And I’m tired of words like “agency” and “intersectionality”–please go to a physical location and work with refugees or even better, refugees with disabilities. 

See? I told you I was distempered in my post last night. 

I’m not tired of John Lennon but I’m tired of Yoko Ono. 

John Lennon: “I’m sick and tired of hearing things from uptight neurotic narrow minded hypo-critics, all I want is some truth…”

I am not tired of Bob Marley or the entire Marley family. I want to put them on Mt. Rushmore.

I am not tired of poetry but I could do without the $100 million building that Poetry Magazine built for themselves after a rich benefactor left them a pile. Why didn’t they just move to Vegas? Or Amityville?

ON an airplane, a guy who works for big oil tells me that hydrogen fuel is going to save the planet. Of course I told him to hurry up. 

I am not tired of Michelle Obama. In fact I generally give first ladies a lot of slack. I even gave Nancy Reagan a lot of slack. I never did like Barbara Bush. I suspected her of loving her dogs more than her children. And we all know how that worked out.

And I’m not tired of wind in the trees. Theres a near willow that refreshed me yesterday. And I’m not tired of being alone. 

I wrote the following last night in a notebook: 

And so what does it mean, pale geographies of the heart,

Wishful hour alone at a window? Boyhood I was always alone,

blind kid with puppets and home made songs.

Will the hours ever be softer than they were in those days?

It was sweet to be lonesome with crickets 

Who sang in the broken furnace.

**

On Saturday last, I told a group of optometrists that the biggest contribution to cultural literacy after the invention of the printing press was the introduction of spectacles. I told them that Benjamin Franklin, James Joyce, and John Lennon were all incapable of seeing without spectacles. 

We better have some basic wonder about the things we do. That’s if we’re to get on with civilization. A pencil is a miracle. And shoes. And James Joyce. 

**

Dear Orbitz: write me when you have an offer that will send me to an island of small horses. 

Well it occurs to me that I’m guilty of saying very little on my wee blog as of late. I’m irascible and phlegmatic and shit am I grumpy. It’s not fair to my readers to sound off. But when I total up all the misadventures of my nation, the war in Iraq which has killed over 100,000 civilians; the endless and ill conceived war in Afghanistan; the systemic lies of the corporate media, arguments stacked against the poor and the lower classes, always in favor of giving the rich even more breaks–when I catalogue these things I grow more distempered by the minute. I feel brittle, more than half humorless. I want to bite a live woodchuck like Thoreau. I want to roll in the dirt and howl like Whitman. It’s not easy to blog under such circumstances. I’m supposed to be clever and urbane. Or at least sufficient possessed of cultural irony to make sense of the moment. Instead I think about Paul Ryan’s GOP budget plan which will in fact put hundreds of thousands if not millions of poor and disabled Americans into life threatening extremis. I can’t be witty in the face of this. The objectified and propagandized cruelty of the Republican budget platform is unlike anything we’ve seen in this nation. 

So that’s why I’m swing so little. I’m worried. Worried half to death. I have health care and a job. I know how fragile these things are and especially for people with disabilities. 

What’s a blogger to say or do? 

Excellent essay by our friend Bill Peace:

http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Publications/HCR/Detail.aspx?id=5905

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

Doug Glanville’s oped about R.A. Dickey in today’s NY Times is must reading.

From The New York Times:

OPINIONATOR: I Am What I Throw

The Mets’ R.A. Dickey couldn’t have a more appropriate pitch than the knuckleball.

http://nyti.ms/OlVkuH

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

They took us to cemeteries, many times, always in the hot car,

And there were oak trees, hyacinths, women’s hats. 

Grandmother spoke words of fright with a Finnish accent.

We learned to sit still, 

Letting sadnesses trail from the windows. 

Been doing a lot of whining about my bad back and I'm sorry about that. It's not the pain that's getting to me though. That's mainly annoying.� What's driving me crazy is the way it's limited me. I can't do a lot of the things that I not only could do but enjoyed doing. Take long walks. Putter around the yard. Sit and read for hours. Stand up.

Yesterday I was out on my bike for the first time in over a year and it dawned on me. It hasn't been as much the matter that I can't do these things as that I've been avoiding doing theses things, telling myself to wait until my back feels better. Which of course has contributed to making it feel worse. So what 's really making me nuts is that I've let it turn me into a big baby.

I've seen the doctor. He ordered X-rays. They came back a couple of weeks ago.� No slipped discs. No fractures. I was expecting to be carted off for immediate surgery.

Wait til your appendages start falling off! Then the doc will say those things were just vestigial, don't ya know?

    Shutting an eye can be just as difficult

    as shutting an ear, believe it or not.

    –Lars Gustafsson

Dear Lars: In my country the vast majority have accomplished the most difficult thing and have managed to shut their eyes. We were good at keeping them open until the American Bicentennial, but something happened in the mid 70’s and people began closing their eyes like angry children. Was it the military industrial complex? JFK? Viet Nam? Watergate? Birds flew into windows. Adolescents ran away. Tiny cyclones swept through tasteful living rooms. Books piled up on desks. One said TV killed democracy. Another said it was insatiable vanity. Soon librarians shut their eyes. And students, who once were our vanguard, they fell asleep.

Lars, those who kept their eyes open by means of strength and sorrow, through sad cheer– they felt themselves standing on the perilous front of a lost battle–the only place where they might confess their hope.

TELL YOUR SENATORS TO SUPPORT DISABILITY RIGHTS EVERYWHERE!!

Support the Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities (CRPD)

ATTEND THE SENATE HEARING SCHEDULED FOR THURSDAY, JULY 12TH

AND CONTACT KEY SENATORS!

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is an international treaty that outlines the obligations of ratifying countries to promote, protect, fulfill, and ensure the rights of persons with disabilities. It embodies the American ideals that form the basis of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by empowering persons with disabilities to be independent and productive citizens. The US signed the CRPD on July 30, 2009.

Three years later, the Convention has yet to be ratified by the United States! 153 countries have signed it and 115 others have already ratified it!

On May 17, 2012, the Obama Administration submitted its treaty package to the Senate, which has since been supported by a bipartisan group of Senators.

Thanks to the disability community’s hard work, a hearing on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) has FINALLY been scheduled for Thursday, July 12 in the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

But we still need your help convincing the Foreign Relations Committee to VOTE YES and send the treaty to the Senate floor for a vote!

We need you to fill the room at the hearing to show our support for the CRPD!

We have received word that the Home School Legal Defense Association, which opposes the CRPD, has activated national calls in opposition to the Convention based on inaccurate statements about the treaty. They will NOT stop us with stall tactics nor erroneous interpretations of the treaty language. Let our voices be heard over the opposition … make a call to your Senator on the Foreign Relations Committee and tell them that the disability community needs their support!

Attend the hearing currently scheduled for THURSDAY, JULY 12TH AT 9:00 AM IN SENATE DIRKSEN OFFICE BUILDING ROOM G50 (note that the time is currently scheduled for 9 am but may change. To see the latest schedule click here)

MESSAGE: “Senator, I am a constituent from your state and I support the CRPD. I look to you to attend the Foreign Relations Committee hearing on July 12th and to support ratification. The CRPD is in the United States’ interests, protects our citizens and veterans abroad, and honors the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

CONTACT:

Chairman: Senator John Kerry (D-MA)

(202) 224-4651

Ranking Member: Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN)

(202) 224-6797

Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) COSPONSOR OF CRPD

(202) 224-6441

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA)

(202) 224-3553

Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD)

(202) 224-4524

Senator Bob Casey, Jr. (D-PA)

(202) 224-6324

Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) COSPONSOR OF CRPD

(202) 224-5042

Senator Bob Corker (R-TN)

(202) 224-3344

Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC)

(202) 224-6121

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) COSPONSOR OF CRPD

(202) 224-2152

Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK)

(202) 224-4721

Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA)

(202) 224-3643

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT)

(202) 224-5444

Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ)

(202) 224-4744

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)

(202) 224-3041

Senator Jim Risch (R-ID)

(202) 224-2752

Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)

(202) 224-2841

Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) COSPONSOR OF CRPD

(202) 224-6621

Senator Jim Webb (D-VA)

(202) 224-4024

American Association of People with Disabilities

2013 H Street NW, 5th Floor | Washington, DC 20006

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From: What a Dog Can Do: A Memoir of Life with Guide Dogs, by Stephen Kuusisto, forthcoming from Simon and Schuster

No one knows when the forerunner of today’s guide dogs first appeared. Drawings of blind people accompanied by dogs date back to the 17th century. Those early pairings were most likely memorization teams, one pictures the dog leading its partner through the village square. It’s clear no substantial training was involved. But we can imagine the tremendous bond with dogs that developed between the uncharted and lonely blind people of prior ages. It is a safe bet that dogs solved the puzzle of solitude for blind travelers who lived in a time when sightlessness was a great calamity. (The idea that blind men and women could be taught to read was a late development in cultural history, as Diderot’s essay Lettre sur les aveugles published in 1749 offered the first speculation that raised letters might be possible.) The world of the blind has been a dismal place throughout much of history. It’s possible to say, along with the poet Pablo Neruda that pure faith cannot withstand the assaults of winter, but your survival is more likely with a dog. Sometimes when I think about the ancient blind with their lives of begging and fiddle playing, their relentless wandering, homelessness, sickness, I weep to imagine the righteous loyalty of those early dogs.

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