Category: Uncategorized

Last night while appearing on the Tonight Show President Obama compared his family’s bowling adventures in the White House basement to the Special Olympics and within moments of climbing back aboard Air Force One his staff was hitting the phones to apologize to the Shriver family as a means of controlling the damage.That’s perhaps as it should be but this is something more serious than a mere P.R. gaffe. 

Because I don’t believe that the dignity of people with disabilities is negotiable it follows that when physical challenges are used as an analogy for able-bodied ineptitude the symbolic exchange values are skewed away from humor and toward bigotry. Like it or not President Obama must be held to a higher standard given his ardor for change and his well demonstrated sensitivity regarding people who have been historically marginalized in America. Translation: disability is a serious business particularly in these days when we are reading of criminality in the care of our most vulnerable citizens.

Yes, Queen Victoria, we are not amused.

 

For another post on this matter see what Bad Cripple has to say.

 

S.K. 

My friend Ruth O’Brien’s new anthology of essays and legal analysis concerning women and civil rights issues in the workplace has been chosen as a book club selection by The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund.

 

We are very pleased at POTB to learn of this and of course we recommend Ruth’s book to everyone who is interested in women’s rights and justice in the workplace.

 

S.K.

David W. Boles over at Urban Semiotic has a terrific post from 2007 about the “Ugly Laws” –laws that were on the books in the 19thand 20th centuries  both in the United States and in Great Britain and which were designed to keep people with disabilities off the streets. This development came out of the eugenics  movement: it was believed that deformed or crippled people were a blight on healthy humanity and per force such people needed to be sequestered in back rooms or better yet in institutions.

This story isn’t news to disability studies scholars or to people with disabilities who have an interest in the history of disability and civil rights but its often a shocker to students taking a disability studies course for the first time. Of course once they’re shocked they are even more apalled to find that tens of thousands of people with disabilities are still living in institutions against their wills.

Like the ghost of old Marley in  “A Christmas Carol” the spirit of the eugenics movement still walks and drags along behind it the chains it forged a generation ago.

Each day as we read about the abuses being committed in state schools and institutions against the mentally ill or the developmentally disabled we are being hit over the head by the legacy of ugly laws and Social Darwinism. How is it possible that despite the fact that its more cost effective for people with disabilities to live in their own communities these antiquated and abusive institutions continue to exist?

The answer to this question is that the NIMBY principle and hieratic governmental administration work in tandem.  No one associated with state and local legislative bodies would openly declare his or her affection for the ugly laws but having a budget and an institution to administer is a time honored way to handle matters.

Yet as mentioned above its cheaper and altogether more humane for people with disabilities to live in their communities. There are also spin off benefits to be realized from this as young people can volunteer to help pwds who have returned to the public and dare we mention that with familiarity comes the civic life?

 

S.K.

There’s a post over at The River of Jordan that I have been mulling over for a long time. “Jordan”is a little boy whose mom writes with discernment about how he is not the sum of his disabilities. This is of course very very important for those who are outside   this thing called “the disability community”. By analogy no one is ever believed to be the sum of his or her bones, the outcome of his or her dental work (well, maybe that isn’t true in Hollywood?) but outside the world of pwds where the indeterminacy of bodies is understood those who have impairments are still conceived of as faulty algebraic equations. In the post I’ve linked to above, Jordan’s mother writes about the myriad and indeed relentless ways that doctors attempted to persuade her that her infant son would be impaired in hyper-theric ways–she was told that he would have so many maladies and incapacities that his life wouldn’t be worth a thing.

Jordan’s mom writes:

“I recently edited a book that prepares people for taking a nursing exam. The author stresses that giving “false hope” is unethical. Nurses shouldn’t say, “Everything will be okay” when it might not be. But is it also unethical to give only worst-case scenarios? That seems to be all doctors give these days. I understand they want to protect themselves from malpractice suits. But would it be so bad to give a little hope once in a while? Anyway, can hope ever be “false?””

Often it seems to me that those of us who reside (whatever that means?) within the disability community are better able to talk about both the poetry and the pragmatism of being alive than those who live in the constant expectation that normal health is sustainable or to be counted on.

Wheelchair Dancer  writes about the ways that “universal design” is being marketed as an aesthetic idea to the baby boomers who presumably have enough retirement income to imagine that they won’t be disabled they’ll just be “aging in place”. This is the architectural co-efficient  of the medical narratives that are described by Jordan’s mom–the expectation is that disability is (for lack of a better term)a “take away”–as if living in a body is some kind of board game in which the “d” word is like the “Go to Jail” card in the Monopoly game.

Why should we who have disabling conditions have to assert and re-assert the full value of living or say that beyond mere existence there’s artful splendor about our ordinary days and nights? This is a serious question and its not enough to say that we are talking back to the normates or taking on the social construction of normalcy or whatever one wants to call the matter. We are all too often forced to talk among ourselves because the “Go to Jail” card troubles the public’s nerves like smoke above a scene of violence–the “d” word is so deeply and psychologically devastating that its far worse than Hester’s scarlet letter. (One  can avoid having to wear the scarlet letter by the force of her will; avoiding disability is simply a matter of luck or concurrent with genetic counseling.)

It is the word “disability” that forces pwds to talk among ourselves.

Dark Angelwrites about having an undiagnosed autism-spectrum disorder and the agonies of living publicly as someone who was often judged to be deviant (to use VictorTurner’s anthropological term). Now that he knows what he “has” he feels like telling people to    “Stuff it.”

Disability is not an extrinsic social or cultural matter but despite the staggering numbers of pwds here in this country and around the world we are still encoded as people who reside outside the ritual circle of the village. Baby boomers would rather “age in place” than admit to having disabilities. The pediatric doctors would rather talk about the calamities of disabilities than the complex ways that human beings grow and adapt and live–yes, really live.

 

S.K.

A friend sent us the following. We like hearing this kind of thing. We wish for more such stories.

Cheerios Boxes Feature Disabled Vet.   In continuing coverage, the Mobile (AL) Press-Register (3/17, Hayes) said disabled veteran “Patrick Peterson – a three-time gold medal winner in weightlifting and wheel chair racing – is featured on 3 million boxes of Cheerios cereal. General Mills, however, got Peterson’s hometown wrong,” listing “it as Fairhope, Alaska, not Alabama.” But the “mild-mannered Peterson,” who won three gold medals at the 2008 National Veterans Wheelchair Games “is not discouraged easily,” saying, “For me to call and fuss and have them take me completely off,” was not necessary. The AP (3/17), which published a similar story, noted that the cereal boxes “will be sold at military commissaries, canteens” and Veterans Affairs hospitals.

Whether the subject is the veteran’s administration which works to prevent vets from receiving PTSD assistance or we’re talking about residential schools for the mentally ill or people with severe developmental disabilities the fact is that management is utterly broken. One cannot employ the word “corruption” since corruption depends by extension on the presence of an otherwise honorable system. In effect we’re seeing a vast network of sub-corruption which has been made possible by heartless underfunding and eager bureaucratic neglect. Dave Reynolds over at Inclusion Daily Express has posted the following editorial which we in turn share below. We think outrage should be in order. We think that in human and moral terms the AIG story is nothing compared to this.

 

S.K. 

 

Casey: State School Fights Are Symptom Of Sick System
(Houston Chronicle)
March 11, 2009
HOUSTON, TEXAS– [Excerpt] Football star Michael Vick got 23 months for arranging dogfights.

What should the punishment be for staffers at the Corpus Christi State School if they are found guilty of entertaining themselves by arranging unwilling fights between severely mentally disabled residents?

Police say they have a cell phone videotape clearly showing an “organized” event in which as many as 11 staffers are seen cajoling, taunting and pushing residents into fights.

It is a barbaric impulse that goes back at least to the Romans, who amused themselves by forcing slaves to fight each other to the death as gladiators, or Christians to fight lions.

Entire article:
Casey: State school fights are symptom of sick system
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6304217.html

While the cameras roll and the President and Congress snarl about AIG and bonuses a travesty of much greater significance in real dollar terms has quietly been allowed to occur. The Obama administration’s tax plan removes charitable giving incentives for America’s wealthiest citizens, a matter that will result in billions less in philanthropy starting this year.

I have received three guide dogs directly as a result of charitable giving. Guiding Eyes for the Blind receives no government money. None. Zip. Nada. And while almost everyone can agree that making a donation to a top rate guide dog training program is unambiguously good one can surely acknowledge that a tax policy that makes it harder for those with deep pockets to make charitable donations is bad no matter how you slice it.

Each time the stock market drops 100 points estimates are that charitable giving loses a billion dollars in donations. Given the plunge that’s happened since September we can well imagine there will be 40 to 50 billion less in philanthropic donations in 2009and that’s of course a conservative estimate that doesn’t factor the new Obama tax plan into the mix. The truth is no one knows what the Obama tax plan is going to do to charitable giving. But no one can argue that its gonna be good.

There. Now I’ve done it. I sound like a Republican. I’ll take the chance. Creating disincentives for philanthropic giving is a big mistake.

 

S.K. 

State Contradicts Medical Examiner On Woman’s Cause of Death
(Associated Press)
March 16, 2009
DENTON, TEXAS– [Excerpt] State officials said Monday that the death of a 53-year-old mentally disabled woman residing at the Denton State School was an accident, even though the Tarrant County Medical Examiner has ruled it a homicide by assault.

Laura Albrecht, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Aging and Disability Services, said Janice Campbell’s death occurred when she and another resident at the school accidentally collided.

The medical examiner’s Web site states that Campbell died Friday at a Fort Worth hospital. It says the cause of death was a closed head injury due to assault and that the manner of death was homicide.

Linda Anderson, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office, said Campbell’s death was ruled a homicide on the basis of autopsy results and information provided by the physician who treated her injuries.

Entire article:
State calls death at state school an accident
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/6314074.html

 

For more on this story visit

http://www.InclusionDaily.com

 

S.K.

A friend asked me today what I’m taking satisfaction from–the context was disability work–and I said that the ADA Restoration Act has been a good sign. Then she asked what still bothers me and I said that there are daily stories of abuses  being perpetrated against people with disabilities at schools and residential facilities in these United States and that these stories are haunting and outrageous.

I stopped then. I was about to go on and talk about the failure of our nation’s large media to pick up these stories of disability abuse. Our national airwaves have been given over to ideological palaver and histrionics and the maltreatment of our nation’s elderly or the mentally ill or of school kids with learning disabilities is never and I mean never the topic of conversation or even simply disclosed.

The failure of our news engines to talk about real lives and the consequent agonies of a broken health care system leads inexorably to the business of abstraction. Just as Americans have been able to rationalize the use of torture by saying we don’t really water board people we imagine that these abuses of the elderly or of the mentally ill are somehow happening to distant people, people not of our own kind, not of our circle, our neighborhood, in other words  its not in my department.

I have been dismayed over the past two decades as I’ve watched people in the United States talk with ever increasing allegiance about Christian values while the nation has simultaneously veered further and further away from the ideals of equal opportunity in public education, in health care, in basic matters of human dignity.

There is, it seems, a rampant, smug, and workaday hypocrisy that’s greasing our nation’s wheels. This ain’t news for readers of literature. We make novels out of this and we talk about such matters in English classes. Theodore Dreisser or Flannery O’Conner are as relevant today as they were when their works were brand new.

What’s new is the increasing American tolerance for human suffering–a new kind of imagination if you will wherein the maltreatment of people with disabilities is overlooked, not because Americans think this is okay, but because talking about this is really a matter of widening the discussion about our nation’s health care system and its shameful inequalities. On the day that President Obama unveiled his budget for the next year, NBC’s Today show opened its morning broadcast with a packaged question: “Is the President Taking on Too Much? Viewers were treated to the sight of Jack Welsh, the former and forever scion of General Electric which owns NBC and he opined that the president shouldn’t be doing all these ambitious things at once.

Translation: don’t mess with health care. But this opinion piece on the Today show was, for me, coincidental with the news that the mentally ill are being abused in state after state. Who can hold his or her head up proudly or maintain level eye contact with real Christians while knowing what a shameful state of affairs is truly being perpetrated against our most defenseless citizens? 

John Kennedy said we should ask ourselves what we can do for our country and to this I add we ought to hold in our minds the golden rule. Would you want bad health care for your own children? I doubt it. Would you want to turn abuse of your neighbor’s children into an abstraction? This latter question is the most dangerous. Maybe we need more Theodore Dreisser after all?

 

S.k. 

Los Angeles

By Andrea Scarpino

 

My father was a longtime Syracuse University basketball fan. He did his graduate studies at Syracuse, and for most of my life, a Syracuse blanket and pennants hung in the hallway of our attic (fan that he was, he was also tasteful enough not to hang it where most people could see it). He would listen to their games on the radio while he worked, and would watch them play on TV weekend afternoons. He wasn’t a stereotypical sports fan, though he watched most big games and could speak about the teams and players with a level of proficiency that always surprised me.

Instead, he was a microbiologist who studied water disinfection, helped develop the first water treatment facility in the world that uses granular activated carbon to disinfect water and then convinced Cincinnati to actually build his system. He taught at the University of Cincinnati for close to 40 years, and traveled the world researching and speaking about water. He woke up regularly at 4 in the morning in order to get started on his day’s work. I mean, he watched the Super Bowl in dress shirt and suit pants, for god’s sake, but he knew what the important plays meant to the outcome of the game.

He followed other teams besides Syracuse, particularly the Cincinnati Bearcats and their long struggle to get past the second round of the NCAA tournament. But he really lit up when Syracuse was playing. So this past weekend, when my partner Zac told me Syracuse had won a semifinal game against Connecticut in the Big East Conference Tournament after SIX overtimes, I paid much more attention than usual when presented with sports updates. This was my father’s team that played an additional 30 minutes over the usual amount, stretching a game that started at 9:30 in the evening to almost 1:30 the next morning. Syracuse guard Jonny Flynn played 67 minutes out of the game’s eventual 70 minutes, and a total of 8 players fouled out on both teams by the time Syracuse won.

Of course I understand, this was just one game. Nothing monumental hinges on college basketball, and usually, I feel a mild hostility towards interest in sports (and mild tends to be an understatement). But I couldn’t help imagining what my father would have said if he had seen this game, how his own work ethic would have informed his understanding of what the players were pushing themselves to do, and what they had accomplished by the end of the game. I thought, watching game highlights on the internet and the growing exhaustion overtaking the players on both teams, that my dad would have been having a blast. He would have popped some popcorn to go with his bedtime glass of milk, and he would have stayed up watching TV until the very last minute of the very last overtime, watching those orange jerseys move up and down the court, watching the orange tee-shirts in the stands. Atta boy! he would have yelled at the TV again and again.

 

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast bureau chief of POTB and you can visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com