Category: Uncategorized

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

When I was a kid and my dad was working in Albany, New York we used to go to Joe’s which in those days was the most authentic New York style delicatessen in the city. You could get your smorgasbord “to go” or “eat in” for indeed many of the New York legislators and their pals would occupy the banquettes and tables and hunch over the pasta Alfredo or the unbelievable roast beef sandwiches. They used to offer a sandwich they called “The Londoner” which was the rarest roast beef piled high on first rate Jewish rye with horseradish and Russian dressing, tomatoes, and by god I’ve searched all my days ever since for a sandwich that could match it and I’ve never found   it–not at the Carnegie Deli or the Stage Deli in New York,not at Katzinger’s Deli in Columbus, Ohio (a famous German town), not in London or Poughkeepsie. And so I say let others bemoan the fall from grace of esteemed poets of yore, let others chatter about the good old days when men were men and women were glad of it, or encourage your neighbors to admit they miss Richard Nixon–I don’t give a tinker’s damn for these sentimental preoccupations for my personal regret is that America no longer produces the sandwiches of bygone days and perhaps, just perhaps this is why we no longer have bi-partisanship in the legislative body politic. I’m just sayin’. 

 

S.K.

This is the first time I’ve ever written a blog post while flying. I’m heading back to Iowa from the Tucson Festival of the Book, Nira my guide dog is stretched out at my feet. I’ve just had the obligatory can of Coke and we’re about 200 miles away from Cedar Rapids. If there’s a theme to this mid-flight post its that sometimes I feel lucky. I have had the opportunity these past two days to meet all kinds of people who love books. I met several teenagers from the Arizona School for the Deaf and Blind. I heard some blind kids singing rock and roll. I heard my friend the poet and nonfiction writer Peggy Shumaker read alongside the poet C.K. Williams. I had dinner with many of the business leaders who helped to make this Tucson festival possible and I made many new friends. My own reading was also a Q. And A. Opportunity for people who wanted to talk about everything from assistive technology to literature and poetry to the very real posssibility that a cure for blindness may be coming in our lifetimes. It was a good journey. In the Dallas airport while riding the electric cart to my connecting flight I met my old friend and former neighbor, the poet Billy Collins who was also at the Tucson event. We had a lovely 10 minute conversation that felt richer and deeper than its duration would suggest.

The Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski once said: “I want to be the kind of poet who can build houses for people.” As writers we hope to build communities. I was lucky these past couple of days to see many who feel the same way. Though you’d scarcely know it from watching TV news, this is still a great nation. And trust me it ain’t the Coca-Cola that put me in this state of mind. Our flight is nearing Cedar Rapids so I’m going to sign off. Let spring come with new books and fresh ideas for all who would have them.

S.K.

I am in Tucson, Arizona for the Tucson Festival of Books which is being hosted at the University of Arizona’s campus and is being sponsored by a remarkable coalition of Tucson business leaders and educators. There is something here for everybody whether you are a kid who loves adventure or fantasy stories, an adult in love with Noir, (notice that I capitalize Noir?) or perhaps you’re in love with contemporary poetry. If you are a reader of this blog and you’re within easy distance of Tucson you should drive or pogo stick your way over to the fine events taking place today and tomorrow.

For my part and speaking as an Iowan, I’m just amazed to be walking around in a place where there are birds and daily drafts of warm wind. I haven’t experienced temperatures like this since September. My guide dog Nira is all a quiver with the news from her nose.

One of the things I most admire about the festival is that its organizers understood from their earliest brain storming sessions that this should be not only a celebration of writing but a progressive vehicle for encouraging reading and literacy in a part of the country where functional illiteracy is very high. IN short: the folks behind this festival hope to turn children “on” to books. What could be better?

On my way here I met a 10 year old boy named Ethan who was sitting behind me on my American Airlines flight from Cedar Rapids, Iowa to Dallas. About twenty minutes into the flight Ethan tapped me on the shoulder. He was both sweet and shy and he was taking an optimistic step out of his comfort zone. I could hear his mom encouraging him from her seat just behind me.

“Are you Stephen Kuusisto?” he asked.

“Why yes I am.” I said.

“Well, my name is Ethan and I read your book Planet of the Blind.”

As you can well imagine I was fair amazed. Ethan then went on to tell me that just like me he was born prematurely.

Now how cool is that?

Kids reading books. Kids gaining strength from books.

You just can’t top that.

But Ethan did top it.

His fifth grade social studies teacher is in fact my good friend Lorraine Whittington.

I think Ethan was more astonished to discover that I know “Mrs. Whit” even more than he was when he saw me seated in the row in front of him.

Mrs. Whit is very cool.

I will never forget that airplane conversation.

Let’s all do our darndest to promote books and more books for kids and more kids.

I’m surely hoping that the Tucson Festival of Books becomes an annual event.

S.K.

 

Dave Reynolds over at Inclusion Daily Express posts the following story:

 

Institution Workers Video-Recorded Fights After Goading Residents To Brawl
By Dave Reynolds, Inclusion Daily Express
March 10, 2009

CORPUS CHRISTI, TEXAS–Several residents of Corpus Christi State School were forced to fight each other in the middle of the night, while shift workers laughed and video-recorded the brawls, according to local police.

“I’ve been in police work for 30 years, and I’ve never seen something like this,” said Corpus Christi Police Captain Tim Wilson. “These workers are exploiting them for their own entertainment.”

Wilson is investigating the allegations along with the Office of Inspector General of Texas Health and Human Services.

Wilson’s office received a cell phone last week from a citizen that said it was found along a road. The phone reportedly has at least 20 separate videos dating from 2007 to just last month, showing young men with intellectual disabilities engaged in fighting similar to that in the movie “Fight Club”.

“The fighting entails pushing, wrestling and some shoving,” Wilson explained.

Wilson, who has refused to release the video to the public, said many of the men are just seen standing around in the facility’s ‘day room’, at first.

“They are being more goaded into it. There’s a lot of voices on there from workers . . . saying, ‘Look at that, ha ha’ . . . laughing, stuff like that.”

While none of the men are recorded crying or appearing injured in the videos, none of the 10 or so state employees on the videos are seen stopping the fighting either.

“I’ve heard of isolated incidents before,” Wilson said, “but what’s most appalling is that it’s obvious this is organized.”

Wilson added that it was not yet clear whether employees gambled on the outcome of the fights, or whether the images were uploaded to the Internet.

The Dallas Morning News reported Tuesday that at least eight employees have been suspended pending the investigation. Two others have been fired, and two have resigned.

Wilson said that he expects to file criminal charges by the end of the week.

Responding to the news, state officials immediately halted admissions to Corpus Christi State School while the investigation is underway.

Governor Rick Perry’s office also ordered video cameras to be installed immediately at all 13 state-run institutions that house people with intellectual disabilities, and that more security officers, overnight supervisors, and surveillance camera monitors be placed in the facilities.

In the fiscal year that ended last August, the Corpus Christi facility had nearly 1,000 allegations of abuse, neglect or mistreatment. Sixty of those were confirmed.

The allegations came to light just as the state Senate unanimously approved a measure to provide extra protections for several thousands of people housed in Texas institutions.

A report by the U.S. Department of Justice revealed in December that residents at Texas institutions are often victims of abuse, neglect and inadequate medical treatment — and that at least 53 died just within the past year from inadequate medical care. Lack of adequate staffing has been blamed for much of the trouble.

For years, several disability rights groups have called for some or all Texas institutions to be shut down, and the residents to be moved to homes in the community.

Related:
Police: Disabled forced to fight in Corpus Christi school (Houston Chronicle)
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6303104.html
Corpus Christi State School investigated after ‘fight club’ videos of residents found
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/2009/red/0310d.htm