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Obama's Economic Stimulus Includes Relief for People with Disabilities

During the presidential campaign Barack Obama promised to promote jobs, independent living, and health care for people with disabilities. His stimulus package which is currently under review in the House of Representatives calls for 20 billion dollarsto address these critical needs. Perhaps the most heartening dimension of the proposed spending for pwds is the funding that is specified to move people from institutions to community living. As the old Sam Cook song says: “It’s been a long time coming…”

Here in Iowa we know that people are being held in hospitals who would prefer to live in their communities.Community is the signature of human identity and there’s a strong argument to be made that community is in the human genome. There’s an equally strong argument that American identity springs entirely from communitarian values. Restoring citizens with disabilities to our communities is really a matter of living up to our human heritage and our national ideals.

Let us hope for swift passage of this stimulus by both houses of Congress.

Hiu Lui Ng

At the New York Times one can read the story of Hu Lui NG who was held in custody by the U.S. Immigration Service and although he had a fractured spine and cancer was bodily dragged about by guards and denied use of a wheelchair among other atrocities. And yes the facility where Mr. Ng was essentially tortured to death was a subcontracted private prison, one of the many McJails favored by the U.S. government in these pestilential days of industrial incarceration.

Human rights abuses start from the top. Fish stinks from the head. I hope that as the Obama administration calls for transparency in government that we steady our public nerve and cry out for liberty and justice for all.

In the meantime I had to laugh rather darkly to myself when I heard yesterday on NPR that a group of citizens couldn’t get into the inaugural ceremonies. For a moment I thought that perhaps NPR would cover the fact that people with disabilities couldn’t get in. But no. It was a story about people with fancy invitations on expensive card stock who were locked out of the events because the police were overtaxed by crowds and were unwilling to serve as ushers. The NPR story featured audio of hundreds of locked out people crying “Let Us In!” and I thought: “Well isn’t that just like the able bodied, complaining all the time.”

Oh how they piss and moan those able bodied people. I mean isn’t it enough we give them everything? Now they want equal access? I’m sick of them! Next they’ll be wanting handicapped parking spaces. Oh? Really? Well then they should just shut up.

Meantime I’m thinking that maybe Dick Cheney can roll on over to his nearest VA hospital in his wheelchair and ask them for a repair just for the full glory of the experience. Its never too late to learn how the other half lives.

Oops. I forgot. Cheney avoided the military during the Viet Nam war. The VA quite properly wouldn’t let him in.

Let's All Take Off Our Shirts

A teacher recently arrested in Fairfield, Connecticut for abusing an autistic child made the little girl take off her shirt in class because she wouldn’t stop scratching. As a local police officer said: “You just don’t do that.” Well yes.

Perhaps we should adopt legislation calling upon teachers to routinely play strip poker in the classroom? I see several advantages to this:

Children could learn a valuable lesson about the virtues of giving their clothing to charity.
Kids could strut fake tattoos in preparation for their teen years.
Teachers could take off their shirts and talk about evolution vs. intelligent design.
The whole thing could be a civics lesson: “we’re all equal in our humiliation” etc.

Of course the story itself reveals the usual problems: teachers without sufficient training, an absent teacher’s aid, and who knows what other systemic suspects.

When I was a kid attending public school I was routinely humiliated by teachers who didn’t want a blind kid in their classrooms. I wrote about it in Planet of the Blind. I’m still working those feelings as a grownup. All children know the usual indignities of playground taunts and the ordinary business of antagonisms with teachers. Such things are the building blocks of consciousness to be sure. But humiliation according to a disability is a form of special cruelty. It should indeed be a crime.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up Department

The news that outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney will attend today’s inauguration as a wheelchair user is certainly ironic given the lack of accessibility that was incorporated in the event planning for citizens with disabilities.

A friend wrote this morning to suggest that Mr. Cheney probably hurt his back while hoisting a box of purloined documents. I prefer to think that he was lifting a box of encyclopedias–you know, now that he’s taking all his money and going to Dubai (wherefrom he cannot be extradited, etc.) he’s going to finish his education. He’s going to read about human rights while sitting in his loaner wheelchair. I just know it.

Make Them Go Away

In her book Make Them Go Away disability rights activist Mary Johnson talks about the backlash against persons with disabilities that came on the heels of the Americans with Disabilities Act. While the pace of cultural change is fast and some of her book already feels like an analysis of the 90’s there is no doubt that her prescient and unblinking view of organized ableism in contemporary culture remains entirely and sadly up to date. One reads almost daily of children with disabilities who are subjected to unaccommodating educational experiences; of college students who need to file grievances or lawsuits against their schools because they’ve failed to meet basic minimum ADA requirements; of programs and opportunities for disabled citizens being cut from the diminished rolls of our nation’s remaining social services. It is hard in these times to find a bright spot even as the country looks to Barack Obama for hope and recourse.

But what does it mean to invest in a story? Over the past week I was with lots of talented writers all of whom had their own stories about what’s going on in the world. Many of them without knowing it are convinced the world is ending. This is not uncommon for artists–there’s a considerable history of apocalyptic stories that has come down to us over the millennia. (The Iron Age Finns thought the sun was about to be stolen by witches and carried away to be hidden forever inside a mountain.)

If a scarcity vision is passively incorporated into the governance of thought then by turns one necessarily becomes what I like to call “sub cartesian” for if “I think, therefore I am” is the incitement of the Enlightenment,then “I Don’t Think, and That’s Enough” is the provisional epistemic nomenclature of a commodity driven amateur gloom –I’m thinking here of Hitler’s description of Germans with disabilities as “useless eaters”. There’s only so much freedom, so many apple pies, so many clean walks to the beach, so many books on the shelves–civics can’t be for everybody don’t you know? Didn’t your mother tell you?

When I search the bare, lamp lit and unfurnished room of my private beliefs I find that I do not believe that the end is coming–nor do I think that a de facto Hitlerite reaction is underway where pwds are concerned in this country. But I do think that this is a moment when the tribes of all disabilities must come together to fight hard for a single cause rather than defending the sectarian coverts of provincial argument. This is a hopeful idea. I hold on to this. I think Mary Johnson’s book needs to be read however. Its good to know who your opponents are.

Ableism is Like Drinking Water

A fellow blogger has written to say that he’s been posting about the inaccessibility of the upcoming inaugural events and that he’s received several hostile comments from bloggers who think that “the disabled” are just whining and should shut up.

Ableism.

Its easy. Its like drinking water. How simple this is.

Such people are actually furious about having to be sensitive about all the other identity categories. They hate having to think about the rights of children (you can’t hit them anymore); women’s rights (soon you will have to pay them the same as men); people of color (defenders of Don Imus or Rush Limbaugh, etc. etc.); forgive me–the list is huge. GLBT haters; ethnic baiters; people who hate the social contract hence they hate the poor.

But you can still kick the cripples. Tell them to shut the hell up. Take away their accommodations. Shut down their social services even as you bail out the bankers; laugh at depictions of the blind as groping imbeciles on Saturday Night Live; handcuff those kids with LD who didn’t get the services they needed in the first place.

Glass of water.

Ableism is illegal and how they hate it.

In the meantime they take refuge in anonymous blog comments. Shut the hell up you people you! You war veterans; you parents; you children; you who are the friends of such people. This is America! Don’t you know there isn’t enough time to think about you.

Water.

Other people’s civil rights are just “whining” if you don’t believe in liberty.

That’s the final kicker. Ableists don’t believe in liberty at all.

They might as well hate the moon and the stars. The wind off the oceans. Perfect numbers. Silk worms and thermal dynamics.

But you see the point. They need to hate and the circle of liberated culture is narrowing so terribly fast.

Cripples should stay home where they belong.

Why haven’t they learned that by now?

The Ableist's Bible

If you’re a person with a disability you know all about the ableist who has a hundred verses about your life: you are miraculous, inspiring, pathetic, sad, a tabula rasa for mysticism, a burden, a prop on TV, a victim, irascible, triumphant, confined to a wheelchair, a hero…

The ableist can’t see a disabled person clearly. No matter how hard he or she may try their oversized cardboard spectacles make knowing people who are alternately figured just flat out impossible.

You see I’m just alternatively figured. I’m a man with mostly useless eyes who travels with a trained dog or a white stick and that’s really all there is to it. I learned a few things along the way that keep me in the world or mostly in the world.

Because the term disability is a holdover from the industrial revolution it denotes a person whose body is no longer fit for working in the factories. In essence almost no one with a disability is disabled in this way. Unless that person is denied the appropriate accommodation. Disability is to “Alternately Figured” as the moon is to the tides.

When the Obama inauguration planners create inhospitable spaces for the upcoming events in Washington and tell the alternately figured to stay home then in effect they create disabilities where they shouldn’t exist.

This is ableism.

A few nights ago here in Seaside, Oregon a restaurant owner told me I couldn’t come into his sushi joint with my guide dog. I explained that he was in error about the matter, explained that we should resolve this misunderstanding quickly since if I had to call the police I might then feel like filing charges etc. If that was all there was to the story I wouldn’t tell it. But he went on to attest that the dog’s presence in his restaurant might be problematic for others. “Aha!” I said. “Then you must seat them someplace that’s not in the vicinity of the dog. Guess what? I have civil rights and they don’t depend on the moods of others.”

Ableists believe that the alternately figured are admissable when other ableists feel like it. Ableists are in this way capricious like twelve year old children.

Ableists have an investment in pity though they don’t appreciate the fact. Jerry Lewis is a good example of this since he needs the children who he calls “his kids”to stand as symbolic representations of hapless, wasted lives–Victorian lives that stand in relation to real people who are alternately figured as the topiary garden stands to the savannahs of Kenya–in other words there’s no real comparison. Alternately figured lives are chock full of beauty, intelligence, possibilities, love, and all the virtues. This of course is what the alternately figured comunity has been trying to tell Jerry Lewis for a long, long time. He has treated them with contempt and that’s a long story too.

The ableist believes that the point of view of the alternately figured is entirely inconvenient.

The ableist you see isn’t in the mood.

Wy would Jerry Lewis hold on to inflexible and outdated positions for so long? I think the matter has a lot to do with Hollywood itself. The long, figurative history of disability in the movies is not a noblestory. Martin Norden’s excellent and groundbreaking book “The Cinema of Isolation” details how from the very infancy of the moving pictures disability has been represented in dark andvery troubling ways.

IN short, Hollywood is a bubble. Ableism lives well under that dome.

That’s an old story too.

The ableist isn’t in the mood to hear you. He’s tired of your complaining. He was trying to do something good for your kind. He was reminding TV viewers that we have to save the poor cripples. The ableist doesn’t want you to mess up his story with the facts. He remembers the good old days when the lights would dim in America’s theaters and there’d be an advertisement for The March of Dimes and there were poster children and the collection cans came around the audience row by row.

The ableist is hurt. He wants to save the crippled children from lives of wretchedness.

He’s not in the mood to hear about your college degree you alternately figured complication you.

Jerry Lewis All Over Again

We have received the following note from the writer Anne Finger whose memoir “Elegy for a Disease” we admire over here at the Blind Planet. I think her post needs no additional explanation. Here it is:

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that it will award Jerry Lewis the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the upcoming Oscar award ceremony. Please join disabled people and our allies in protesting this.

Jerry Lewis’s MDA Telethon, rather than working for equality and social inclusion of disabled people, portrays us as hopeless, pathetic, eternal children. Lewis has said, “My kids cannot go into the workplace. There’s nothing they can do.” He has said that a disabled individual is “half a person,” and [If] you don’t want to be pitied because you’re a cripple in a wheelchair, stay in your house!” His telethon reinforces the notion that cure and prevention are what disabled people need, not social change. The LBGT community has protested Lewis’s numerous anti-gay slurs–recently, he referred to cricket as “fag baseball.” Lewis has also stated that he doesn’t like women comedians because he thinks of a woman as “a producing machine that bring babies into the world.” These statements are de-humanizing; the one who uttered them should hardly be given a humanitarian award.

Please sign a petition protesting this at:Jerry Lewis Protest and please forward this email to others. It has been less than a week since we put this petition online, and it has already gathered more than 1700 signatures–including that of Princeton University bioethicist Peter Singer!

Thank you!

Anne Finger

Skinning a Crow

If you have neighbors in your culture they will say there’s more than one way to skin the crow or the aardvark or whatever creature they’re likely to contemplate the skinning of and they will say this because they are related to people who said it and there’s no mystery to this. If your great great great uncle Tom Foolery said there’s more than one way to make pantaloons from clouds then your family would be saying this and chances are good that a whole nation of restless wanderers might be saying it. A phrase doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t have to have meaning insofar as the direct object is concerned. Obviously the skinning of crows is not a profitable industry and it scarcely leads to good eating. You skin a crow because there’s more than one way to do it. There’s more than one way to make pants from a rain cloud. (Best though if you have the rainy part on the outside, the fluffy stuff on the inside, etc.)

The reason some catchy aphorisms and divigations catch on is that they’re attached to living roughly. Skinning a crow is not to be undertaken perhaps but there are useless crows all around the maddening fields and therefore they make themselves available to the poetry of tough living and compensatory nonsense.

Local culture migrates when the aphoristic qualities of its poverty are useful in other towns.

Otherwise a phrase stays behind like the armoire they couldn’t fit in the conestoga wagon.

This is why the rich have no poetry.

Eight Year Old Girl Handcuffed at School

Our friend Ruth over at Wheelie Catholic has a disturbing post with links to many sites devoted to reactions in the asperger’s communities and I urge my readers to see what’s going on. Briefly Evelyn Towry, 8 years old was judged by teachers and school administrators to be sufficiently out of control to warrant calling the police. As I say, you can read more about this apalling story over at Ruth’s site.

in Charles Dickens’ famous novella “A Christmas Carol” the ghost representing the hypothetical future shows Scrooge two starving orphans hidden beneath his cloak. They are labeled ignorance and want. Or something like that. I could look it up but I’m not going to. My point in this instance is that our public schools are one vast unfunded mandate where children with disabilities are concerned. This fact doesn’t excuse the mishandling of Evelyn Towry’s situation but it explains how such an inexcusable and dehumanizing event can occur. Teachers don’t have enough classroom support or special education training;administrators who have little or no ability to fund anything imagine that the police are the only resort.

Abuse is abuse and young Evelyn Towry and her family are in my prayers.

S.K.