Category: Uncategorized

First Autistic Presidential Appointee Speaks Out
(Wired)
October 12, 2010

SYRACUSE, NEW YORK– [Excerpt] When Ari Ne’eman walked onstage at a college campus in Pennsylvania in June, he looked like a handsome young rabbi presiding over the bar mitzvah of a young Talmudic scholar.

In truth, Ne’eman was facilitating a different kind of coming-of-age ceremony. Beckoning a group of teenagers to walk through a gateway symbolizing their transition into adult life, he said, “I welcome you as members of the autistic community.” The setting was an annual gathering called Autreat, organized by an autistic self-help group called Autism Network International.

Ne’eman’s deliberate use of the phrase “the autistic community” was more subversive than it sounds. The notion that autistic people — often portrayed in the media as pitiable loners — would not only wear their diagnosis proudly, but want to make common cause with other autistic people, is still a radical one. Imagine a world in which most public discussion of homosexuality was devoted to finding a cure for it, rather than on the need to address the social injustices that prevent gay people from living happier lives. Though the metaphor is far from exact (for example, gay people obviously don’t face the impairments that many autistic people do), that’s the kind of world that autistic people live in.

Now, as the first openly autistic White House appointee in history — and one of the youngest at age 22 — Ne’eman is determined to change that.

Entire article:
Exclusive: First Autistic Presidential Appointee Speaks Out
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/exclusive-ari-neeman-qa/
Related:
Autism Network International
http://www.autreat.com/

 

The following excerpted article comes to us from Inclusion Daily: 

 

Poll: Most U.S. Employers Give Mere ‘Lip Service’ To Disability Diversity
(Harris International)
October 6, 2010
NEW YORK, NEW YORK– [Excerpt] A new survey sponsored by Kessler Foundation and National Organization on Disability (NOD) finds that although corporations recognize that hiring employees with disabilities is important, most are hiring very few of these job seekers and few are proactively making efforts to improve the employment environment.

These results, from the Kessler Foundation/National Organization on Disability 2010 Survey of Employment of Americans with Disabilities conducted by Harris Interactive, are especially important given the focus on employment by media and government and with October recognized as National Disability Employment Awareness Month.

Data released in July 2010 from an earlier study, the Kessler Foundation/NOD Survey of Americans with Disabilities, found that little progress has been made in closing the employment gap between people with and without disabilities since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. In fact, only 21 percent of people with disabilities, ages 18 to 64, reported that they are working either full or part-time, compared to 59 percent of people without disabilities.

From this latest survey, although 70 percent of corporations polled have diversity policies or programs in place, only two-thirds of those with programs include disability as a component. Only 18 percent of companies offer an education program aimed at integrating people with disabilities into the workplace. The low figures are particularly notable given that a majority of employers perceive the costs of hiring a person with a disability to be the same as hiring a person without a disability (62 percent).

Entire press release:
Harris Interactive Survey Finds Largest Minority Group Falls Behind in Companies’ Attempts to Diversify
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/1006a.htm
Related:
2010 GAP Survey of Americans with Disabilities
http://www.2010disabilitysurveys.org/index.html

By Andrea Scarpino

Scars run lengthwise up each of my heels, maybe 6 inches, maybe a bit more, the result of an operation I had at four months old to lengthen each Achilles tendon. When I was growing up, other kids asked about them pretty regularly; a childhood friend once even said, If I had those scars, I would always wear socks to cover them. But most people don’t seem to notice them any more—or if they do, they don’t ask me about them like they used to. I got lulled into thinking they were nearly invisible.

So this week, I tried to console a friend whose son might have the same surgery by showing him my own scars. They’re no big deal, I said. I thought I was offering comfort, pulled up my pants leg, rolled down my sock. He gasped, Oh my god, looked away. I quickly back peddled, Well I’m sure they have more advanced surgery nowadays.

I don’t think he was trying to be offensive—I think they honestly shocked him. And then I felt bad that my attempt at comforting failed miserably, felt bad that maybe I don’t see my scars the way they really exist. The truth is, without them, I wouldn’t be able to walk, wouldn’t be able to flex my feet. Which is not to say I romanticize them—I still have limited flexibility, still have to layer band aids and moleskin over each scar to keep them from blistering when I break-in new shoes. Sometimes they still feel tender. Sometimes I feel nauseated when other people touch them. But they’ve given me more than the inconveniences they create: movement. Freedom.

And the truth is, I like them. I like that they remind me of the frailty and strength of my body. Of every body. I like that they remind me how precious movement is. Help me to find gratitude in the things my body can do instead of anxiety over the things it can’t. I like that, like Achilles, my weakness lies in my heels. Another friend’s seven-year-old daughter recently told me her own birthmark helps make her unique. Isn’t it cool that we have marks that make us different? she said. And I agreed.

So maybe my scars are shocking, ugly, strange. Maybe they’re more visible than I think. But I am so grateful for what they have given me, grateful for the ways they help me move through the world. Grateful of all they remind me about my body, about the bodies of others. I know it’s a cliché but even if I could, I don’t think I would trade them for perfect tendons, for unscarred, perfectly smooth skin. They’re part of me. Part of how I see myself, part of how I understand myself moving through the world.

 

Poet and essayist Andrea Scarpino is a regular contributor to POTB. You can visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com

Para Equestrians Share Stage With Able-bodied Riders At World Equestrian Games
(Louisville Courier-Journal)
October 5, 2010

LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY– [Excerpt] Throughout the Kentucky Horse Park, athletes in wheelchairs, on crutches and with prosthetic limbs are preparing to compete in the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games.

Para dressage, which starts today with the team competition, will mark the first time athletes with disabilities have competed on this international stage.

“It’s such a big step for us to be included in such a big sports venue,” said Rebecca Hart, the top-ranked member of the U.S. team.

The rules of para dressage are the same as for standard dressage — in which horses and riders must perform a prescribed set of movements or maneuvers.

Para equestrians have competed internationally for many years, but typically those competitions are part of the Paralympics or held by themselves.

“This is what it’s all about, bringing elite athletes together — whether they are disabled or able body,” said Hope Hand, president of the U.S. Para Equestrian Association.

Entire article:
Para equestrians share stage with able-bodied riders at World Equestrian Games
http://www.courier-journal.com/article/2010310040104

From Inclusion Daily:

Torture Allowed In Our Back Yard: Judge Rotenberg Center
(Washington Post)
October 4, 2010

CANTON, MASSACHUSETTS– [Excerpt] “We don’t torture,” President Obama said just days after taking office. Perhaps he is not aware of what is happening in his backyard — to children with disabilities in Massachusetts.

During investigations into treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, detainees reported being short-shackled, verbally abused, isolated, hooded and threatened in ways designed to induce fear of injury, pain and death — including threats that they might be tortured with electric shocks.

State reviews of the techniques used at the Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC) in Canton, Mass., and the center’s Web site have cited skin shocks, shock chairs, shock “holsters,” shackles and social isolation — some of which are applied to school-age children.

Known as a school of last resort, this taxpayer-funded residential facility — at more than $220,000 per child per year as of 2007, according to Mother Jones — has a controversial history. Started by Matthew Israel, a devotee of the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, the school employs “aversive treatment,” a program of behavior modification involving rewards and punishments.

Entire article:
Disabled children at Mass. school are tortured, not treated
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/1004a.htm
Related:
Judge Rotenberg Center — Facility Uses Electric Shock To Change Behavior (Inclusion Daily Express Archives)
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/institutions/ma/jrc.htm

This article comes to us via Inclusion Daily Express:

Developer Imagines “Disability” As A Thing Of The Past
(Scientific American)
October 1, 2010

LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY– [Excerpt] Hugh Herr has made it his mission to eliminate the word “disabled” from our vocabulary when describing people who require assistance of some sort to perform the daily tasks that most people take for granted. Listening to Herr speak here Thursday at Idea Festival, it’s not hard to believe he’ll succeed.

Herr’s credibility comes mainly from two sources. As the director of the Biomechatronics Group in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (M.I.T.) Media Lab, he has pioneered the development of technologies such as advanced prosthetic limbs and exoskeletons for people with missing or damaged limbs. And as a double amputee, Herr is a prime candidate for testing many of his creations. “I’m basically nuts and bolts below the knees,” he pointed out during his Idea Festival presentation.

“I realized that technology has the ability to heal and, in my case, augment,” said Herr, whose legs were amputated 15 centimeters below the knee in 1982 after he spent four days stranded in deep snow on New Hampshire’s Mount Washington. “Imagine a world so advanced where amputees can run, jump and skip better than people with biological limbs.”

Entire article:
Biomechatronics aims to erase the entire concept of ‘disability’
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/1001c.htm

Excerpt from Inclusion Daily

New Study Reveals Lack Of Characters With Disabilities On Television
(Tri-Union Performers with Disabilities Committee)
September 30, 2010

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA– [Excerpt] October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month and a new report released today on minority representation on broadcast television shows that scripted characters with disabilities will represent only one percent of all scripted series regular characters — six characters out of 587 — on the five broadcast networks: ABC, CBS, The CW, Fox, and NBC. Not only is this invisibility in the media misrepresentative of people with disabilities, it also means few opportunities for actors with disabilities to be cast.

While people with disabilities are largely absent from the television scene, they are very present in the American Scene. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2008 American Community Survey, the percentage of U.S. citizens reporting an apparent disability is slightly more than 12% (or 36.2 million people). The inclusion of people with non-apparent, ADA-covered disabilities, such as cancer or HIV, greatly increase this census number. Yet, even the original figure is nowhere nearly reflected by the broadcast networks.

As of this count, three of the six series regular characters with disabilities scheduled to appear in the upcoming season are on the Fox network: the title character on House, who uses a cane, Dr. Remy “Thirteen” Hadley on House who has Huntington’s Disease, and Artie Abrams on Glee, who uses a wheelchair. On three other networks, Saul on Brothers & Sisters (ABC) is living with HIV, young Max Braverman on Parenthood (NBC) has Asperger syndrome, and Dr. Albert Robbins on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS) has a prosthetic leg.

Entire article:
New Study Reveals Lack of Characters With Disabilities on Television
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/0930e.htm
Related:
Tri-Union Performers with Disabilities Committee
http://www.iampwd.org/home

By Angel Lemke

The first publicly “queer” thing I did was attend a candlelight vigil for Matt Shepard during those hours when the machines were still keeping him alive. I knew I was implicitly outing myself by going. I hadn’t yet been to a gay bar, hadn’t yet brought a girl home to meet my mom, didn’t even own anything with a rainbow on it. By being there, I knew I was saying to the world, this matters to me. And by the logic of homophobia, the deaths of queers only matter to other queers. Maybe their immediate family members, if they happened to be lucky in their birth.

But there were straight kids there, after all. And straight faculty. I particularly remember a stodgy theology professor who I would’ve never guessed was an ally. And what that moment told me was that the homophobic message was wrong. This didn’t matter because that kid was gay. This mattered because that kid was human.

Others have written about how Shepard’s race and class status and relative gender normativity made the problem of homophobic violence, momentarily, visible in ways that so many deaths before his had not. It mattered, too, we must now admit, because that kid was white. I think of Eminem’s statement on the Columbine shooting: “Middle America, now it’s a tragedy/Now it’s so sad to see/An upper class city/Havin’ this happen.” And of course, it is a tragedy. But neither case was anywhere near the isolated incidents they appeared to be in media reports. The tragedies themselves are compounded by our inability to see them as part of a larger system of oppression, the world’s apparent indifference to deaths like that of Angie Zapata, to take one recent example. Matt Shepard dies over and over again.

But in the years since that vigil I have had to believe that–however overlaid with race and class bullshit the media coverage might be–the visibility of both Shepard’s murder and Columbine prevented other tragedies from occurring in all those places that Middle Americans cannot seem to see, if only because, for a brief moment, the country stopped to say these kids and their suffering matter to us all. And for a few of us—queers and allies alike—that was enough to keep us going. It was enough to convince us of the message Dan Savage is now trying valiantly to get to these kids: It can get better.

I don’t know much about Tyler Clementi yet. (If Shepard’s case is any indication, we will soon know his life in excruciating detail, a posthumous interrogation.) I know the pictures I’ve been seeing remind me of the “clean-cut,” “all-American” (read: white) Matt. I know he was attending a relatively elite school and played an instrument not often favored by working-class folks. The media response is uncannily similar – the constant presence of that picture, the focus on his activities before and after, the waffling about how much blame we should put on his attackers. They even brought poor tireless Judy Shepard out to speak on a morning news show this morning.

It’s just short of twelve years since Matthew’s death. The fact that this country didn’t notice that it was still going on during that time infuriates me. Let’s not let that happen with Tyler. We’ve broken through the haze of American apathy for a split second. Let’s use it.

Let’s use it to say this: Matt matters. Tyler matters. Angie matters. To all of us. And not just for this news cycle, but until this story disappears from the earth.

Angel Lemke lives in Ohio where she is fighting the good fight.

By Andrea Scarpino

Before I could read or write, I would sit my mother down at her typewriter and speak poems to her that she would type. I didn’t really understand what a poem was, but I knew that I had words inside of me that I needed to share with someone else. Almost my entire life, then, I’ve been creating stories, characters, playing with language, listening for moments and words and colors that I needed to record. Words are how I make sense of the world. Writing them down is how I make sense of the world.

I don’t know why I write other than I have to. That I don’t feel whole, complete when I’m not writing. That writing nags at me, the need to write nags at me. I can go weeks, months without really writing a poem, just recording a quick note here or there, listening for words that I want to return to later. But when too long passes, I start to lose my sense of who I am in the world.

Which makes writing sound incredibly narcissistic—it’s all about me, my stories, my needs. And maybe being a writer necessarily entails some narcissism, some fundamental belief that my ideas and words matter enough for me to record. But writing also helps me to experience other lives, feel empathy for other situations. It’s how I dip my toes into a life I can’t experience any other way. Even when I’m not writing about myself or my own experiences, I write myself into a fuller understanding of the world, the world’s working.

Writing is how I make sense of my experience on this earth. Writing is how I feel alive. Writing is how I remember. How I forget.

In truth, I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have writing, didn’t have some ability to explore on the page. There’s something about that page, that piece of paper, that matters to me. That necessitates my understanding. My life. I write because there’s no other way. No other possibility. I write myself into existence. Write the world into existence. Day after day.

Poet and essayist Andrea Scarpino is a frequent contributor to Planet of the Blind. Visit her at: http://www.andreascarpino.com

I will leave my house in fifteen minutes and take a local bus to the campus of the University of Iowa. Right now I’m sitting in my living room wondering if the day will open doors to better understanding, a warmer and richer appreciation for this planet and all who share it–or will my day be marked by the greater violence that has befallen our nation–witness yesterday’s tragic events at the University of Texas at Austin–events that are not unknown here in Iowa City. As John Lennon famously sang: “Why in the world are we here? Surely not to live in pain and fear?”

The American love affair with assault weapons is of course a love affair with Pluto. That’s the Charlton Heston movie I would have paid to see–Heston not as Moses but as the dark god of death, arms opened wide, jewelled cod piece rising in the flames.

Here’s wishing you a peaceful day.

Hare Krishna.

S.K.