Planet of the Blind

The little dog smiles by pushing his head up.

The big dog smiles by tilting her head.

The man smiles by looking down.

The man has a lot of work to do.

I urge you to visit Disability Power and Pride and learn about their promotion of full participation in politics and culture by people with disabilities. 

I urge you to visit Wordgathering and read poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and literary essays by top tier American writers with disabilities. The latest issue is up.

I urge you to read the following article by Rebecca Schleifer from the Huffington Post:

Rebecca Schleifer: Disabled and Disenfranchised Voters
(Huffington Post)
September 7, 2012

NEW YORK, NEW YORK– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] State efforts to restrict voting access have dominated election news this year. Since the beginning of 2011, legislators in 41 state governments have introduced at least 180 bills that would make it harder to register or to vote. At least 25 laws and two executive actions have been enacted, affecting 19 states. These include laws requiring proof of citizenship or photo identification to register or to vote; limiting voting registration opportunities; and reducing early and absentee voting.

The U.S. Department of Justice and voting rights advocates have challenged these laws for violating the Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act, and raised concerns about their discriminatory impact on low-income people, and racial and ethnic minorities. But what hasn’t been mentioned in the media coverage, and what seems of little concern to supporters or opponents of these laws, is their discriminatory impact on one of the country’s largest minorities: people with disabilities.

Federal laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Help America Vote Act require accessible voting systems, to ensure equal access and participation for people with physical and visual disabilities.

But according to a 2009 US Government Accountability Office study, more than two-thirds of polling places are not fully accessible; nearly 25 percent did not have equal access to a secret and independent ballot, and voting in a polling place, considered the “hallmarks of an effective and informed right to vote,” as voting rights expert Michael Waterstone has noted.

Entire article:
Disabled and Disenfranchised
http://tinyurl.com/ide0907124

I urge you to read the following article from the UK’s Guardian:

Catch Up With The Paralympics Vibe — Stop Excluding Disabled People
(The Guardian)
September 7, 2012

LONDON, ENGLAND– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] The London Paralympics has not only succeeded in getting out a mass message, with 21st-century skill, that disabled people can be sexy, exciting, achievers and media stars. It has also highlighted protests that have made many more people aware of some of the worst contradictions surrounding disability. These include the acceptance of Atos as a Paralympics sponsor at the same time as its heavily flawed assessment procedures are terrorising thousands of disabled people and the arbitrary closure of Remploy factories in the name of inclusion, when more and more disabled people are being excluded from mainstream employment.

Both messages may fade as the thrill of the Games recedes. But the UK’s changing demographics resulting in the presence of many more disabled people of working age and beyond are likely to have a more enduring legacy.

Currently, as can be seen with government welfare reform, the default position for public policy seems to be to treat disabled people as a powerless group to be safely stigmatised, segregated and wheeled on to be scapegoated at difficult times. But the days of such attitudes are likely to be numbered, as disabled people, helped by the Paralympics, emerge as a more substantial, assertive and self-conscious minority.

Sadly, hostility towards disabled people is not confined to politicians and press; both can still count on at least some public support. What isn’t clear is whether such populist prejudice is rooted in perceptions of people making false claims to be disabled, or enduring negative stereotypes of disabled people as dependent, unproductive and parasitic.

Entire article:
Catch up with the Paralympics vibe — stop excluding disabled people
http://tinyurl.com/ide0907127a
Related:
Are companies on track for a sustainable approach to disability? 
http://tinyurl.com/ide0907127b

Back in 1998 I was offered the job of Commissioner of the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities in New York City. I turned it down. I chose to return to teaching and went to Ohio State. Now I’m at Syracuse University and I travel to Manhattan frequently. 

Lately I’ve seen clear evidence that the city of New York is going backwards where disability consciousness is concerned. I have encountered numerous construction sites where sidewalks are blocked off and the feeble detours are entirely inaccessible for wheelchairs, dangerous for blind people, and when you question the man in charge he acts clueless. Clueless is not an acceptable social policy but it’s what’s now passing routinely in NYC for disability engagement and awareness. Not long ago I was denied entrance to an upscale restaurant owned by the Trump conglomerate. The doorman said he knew “all about blindness,” why by jinkies, “I had a blind aunt”–and he wouldn’t let me in because I had a guide dog. 

Admittedly these are anecdotal representations of my thesis that things are in decline in New York. But Mayor Bloomberg has been openly contemptuous of the efforts by wheelchair users who have been advocating for an accessible taxi cab fleet. He actually said: 

“If you’re in a wheelchair, it’s really hard to go out in the street and hail down a cab and get the cab to pull over and get into it.” 

The logic behind this assertion seems to work like this: It’s really hard to be disabled, so stay at home.

Stay at home is also not an acceptable social policy. 

An old friend of mine likes to say that “fish stinks from the head” –a phrase I like and yes, sometimes fish stinks all over. Right now I’d say that the city of New York is in general disability decline because the mayor has made it acceptable to sneer. Where disability and dignity are concerned he’s the sneerer in chief. 

Good or evil, success or failure rest in our hands. 

New York is the gateway to this nation for culture and business–oh, it’s so hard for the wheelchair people to have culture and business, really they should just stay home, eh?

Translation: let’s just make sure they stay home. Let’s continue to make it next to impossible for them to get anywhere. 

 

 

 

 

September 6, 2012

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] [Aditya] Ganapathiraju broke three vertebrae, one of which damaged his spinal cord, paralyzing him below the chest. It took years of therapy and rehab for him to regain some strength and movement and, most importantly, to become independent again.

A crucial element of that, he says, was in-home, state-funded health care; with both his parents deceased, it allowed the 20-something college student to stay out of elderly nursing homes, where he might otherwise be.

“There are a lot of vulnerable folks who rely on this service,” Ganapathiraju said. “It’s unfair, of course, that the situation is how it is. It’s understandable that there are political forces at work.”

Ganapathiraju is referring to state-mandated budget cuts, which slashed in-home personal health care services for the elderly and the disabled. A judge upheld that the cuts are legal, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision, arguing that the cuts violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The state has until September 17 to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, said Carl Peterson with the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network. Peterson joined with other advocates for the disabled Wednesday to call on the state and the governor to not appeal the decision.

Entire article with video clip:
Disabled residents fighting to stop health care cuts
http://tinyurl.com/ide0906121a
Related:
Conference Call of Advocates on MR v Dreyfus (ADAPT)
http://www.adapt.org/main.waolmstead.confcall
Taking Action to Protect Olmstead! (ADAPT)
http://www.dimenet.com/hotnews/archive.php?mode=A&id=7568;&sort=D

Full story here:

http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-family-kicked-off-flight-downs-syndrome,0,6588580,print.story

Just to be clear about the matter, discrimination is always dressed up by false claims about the general good. The pilot who claimed that a child with Down syndrome couldn’t fly on his cross country flight from Newark to Los Angeles because he might distract the crew and thereby affect the safe operation of the aircraft was using the time honored future perfect rationalization of bigots everywhere. Something bad might happen if we let the laborers have the weekend off, if we let people of color read, if we let blind people navigate with dogs. The story of Joan and Robert Vanderhorst and their son Bede breaks my heart and it’s an outrage.

 

Who was I today? In the morning I talked to three men working at a construction site in Manhattan, alerting them to the fact that they’d closed off the sidewalk without imagining accessibility for detouring pedestrians. They seemed hostile at first, then oddly they decided I was a good samaritan and later, when I passed their site, they had put in a ramp. Who was I today? I stuck my neck out with strangers, tried to do the right thing on behalf of other people with disabilities. And it was early in the morning in New York and raining.

 

In the afternoon I realized that both political parties in the US are using nostalgia. Romney’s version is a cross between the homey stage set of “It’s a Beautiful LIfe” and the singing Disney dwarves, happy to go to work with their lunch buckets and mops. Obama’s is an admixture of the New Deal and Bill Clinton’s reakpolitik, therefore insufficiently insistent on taking the fight to the GOP. He has a chance tomorrow night.

 

Political nostalgia demands irony and the voters don’t have enough of it to go around.

 

Who was I today? I talked to someone about disability and the arts and teenagers, imagining a program for kids with disabilities. So I day dreamed a bit. I did some of my day dreaming out loud.

 

Who was I today? I wanted to be someone larger than myself. I wanted to make a difference. I wasn’t nostalgic. I wanted to walk ahead with my head up high like my guide dog does.

I wasn’t useful anymore. I was slipped from the nest, easy does it. Out. But strangely I am still here. My utility is up in the cross winds, a home made kite–you know the one, the kite made of newsprint with a picture of Dwight D. Eisenhower folded across the underside.

 

Birch branches curve slightly upward, less insistent than the oak. Across the street from me, in a different building, is a man who can explain why this is so, but we do not know each other. 

 

Meantime, I guide my life by dreams, inefficient as always, prone to depression, occasionally putting my forehead down on the wet lawn early. 

 

We have received the following email from our good friend Scott Lissner, the distinguished ADA Coordinator at The Ohio State University. We thought we’d share it on POTB:

 

I have always felt history is important and September is a rich month of contrasts, the weather turns from summer to  autumn, the academic year replaces summer break; both Elvis Presley (9/9/1956) and Star Trek (9/8/1966) broke into our national consciousness; President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation (9/22/1862) and President Eisenhower ordered the National Guard to enforce racial integration of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas (9/24/1957)

 

I want to highlight two events related to disability.  The culmination of state sponsored eugenics programs with the initiation of Germany’s T4 Program that began eliminating individuals with genetic disabilities to so they and their potential children would not burden the state (9/1/1939) and the passage of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act which was the United States first step in guaranteeing civil rights for the disabled (9/26/1973).  Below are summaries and resources surrounding these two events

 

 

EUGENICS & STATE SANCTIONED DISCRIMINATION

What became known as the T4 Program, and arguably the Nazi Holocaust  began 72 years ago.  Hitler’s euthanasia decree, dated September 1, 1939, read as follows:

“Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with the responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, to the end that patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment [menschlichem Ermessen] of their state of health, can be granted a mercy death [Gnadentod].”

 

This effort began with the  1933 less than six months after Hitler became chancellor with the  “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases” This law established a policy mandating the sterilization  of anyone with suffering from diseases considered hereditary  including  mental illness, cognitive disabilities, physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism.  The scientific and social basis for Nazi eugenics program was largely imported from the eugenics movement in the United States where laws in twenty-nine states forced  sterilizations on more than 30,000 people between 1907 and 1939.

 

Forced sterilization and the  systematic killing of the disabled where Germany’s first steps in the Holocaust   The T4 euthanasia program was both a rehearsal and justification for Nazi Germany’s subsequent genocidal policies.  Extended the ideological justification for eliminating the  “unfit” from society to other categories of perceived “genetic” threat to society.  The gas chambers and accompanying crematorium designed for the T4 campaign where later utilized to murder Jews, Roma, Sinti and other undesirable and the architects of the T4 program became key figures at among killing centers of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka 

 

Further Informaiton:

 

A Teachers Guide to the Holocaust Includes a section on Handicapped: Victims of the Nazi Era, 1933-1945

The Holocaust History Project  Includes the entire text of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide  Robert Jay Lifton

The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies including The exhibition of the “Hospital” in Hadamar,

Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany  Horst Biesold

 

-30 –

 

SECTION 504 AND EMERGING RIGHTS

On September 25^th of 1973 President Nixon signed Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.  In D.C. the Department of Health Education and Welfare began writing the regulations to ensure that the civil rights objectives of Section 504 could be enforced.  Here in Columbus the Ohio State University began plans for the Office for Disability Services. Three years later the University was forging ahead to ensure access but the regulations to enforce Section 504 were stalled.  On April 5, 1977, thousands of “the disabled” converged on Department of Health, Education and Welfare offices around the country to demand that the equal rights legislation Congress had passed 5 years earlier be implemented.  In San Francisco they took over the HEW Office and started what became the longest  sit-in occupation of a federal building in U.S. history

At 7:30 A.M. on April 28, 1977 they celebrated victory.  The rules implementing Section 504 were signed by HEW Secretary Joseph A. Califano.  Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 is a civil-rights provision. It does not provide funding for any programs or activities; rather, it is a requirement that accompanies federal funding to organizations such as schools and universities. Any organization that receives federal funds – for any purpose – must comply with section 504. Section 504 laid the ground work for the American’s With Disabilities Act of 1990 which established broad civil rights protections for individuals with disabilities.  The community spirit, respect and collaboration that lead to the signing of Section 504 was seen again this past year as the disability community worked with Congress to pass the ADA Amendments Act

“The San Francisco 504 sit-in did not succeed because of a brilliant strategy by a few disability leaders. It succeeded because the Deaf people set up a communication system from the 4th floor windows inside the building to the plaza down below; because the Black Panther Party brought a hot dinner to all 150 participants every single night; because people from community organizing backgrounds taught us how to make collaborative decisions; because friends came and washed our hair in the janitor’s closet sink.   The people doing disability rights work in the 1970s rarely agreed on policies, or even on approaches. The successes came because people viewed each other as invaluable resources working towards a common goal.” (Corbett Joan O’Toole, Ragged Edge Online October 19, 2005) 

Resources

A Look Back at ‘Section 504’: San Francisco Sit-In a Defining Moment

http://www.npr.org/programs/wesun/features/2002/504/

 

The 25 Day Siege That Brought Us 504

http://www.independentliving.org/docs4/ervin1986.html

The Section 504 rules: More to the story

http://www.ragged-edge-mag.com/0102/0102ft6.html

 

Multiple Perspectives On Access Inclusion & Disability Conference

http://ada.osu.edu/conferences/  

 

A History: Disability at Ohio State

http://digitalunion.osu.edu/r2/summer06/kmetz/index.html

 

We were young once. We watched the stars canvas first thoughts. Kid stuff. Clean. Knock knock. Who’s there? Gerard Manley Hopkins. Taught us the serious worship of joy. Here comes the bird whose wingspan opens like pages in wind. I was trying to read poems to a girl in a meadow. We were young once. This was only seconds ago. Finland. A meadow fit for life after life after life.