Dear Mr. Romney, I Have a Vision Impairment and I Vote

Dear Governor Romney:

When I read the article at the Atlantic Monthly today detailing your "high school hijinks" (link below) I was thrown back into my own adolescence which, I assure you, was a time of terrible struggle and pain. I was like your teacher who had the thick glasses–a teacher who you side-swiped, presumably for a cheap laugh. I was the kid with glasses thicker than Coke bottles–they were as thick as padlocks. I walked bent over. I struggled to read the printed word. I belonged to no known social group. I was harassed by able bodied kids in the hallways. By my junior year I was hospitalized with anorexia and exhaustion. I was, in short, the kind of person you would have gleefully victimized. I don't think the word "hijinks" quite captures what you did, Sir, for cruelty is steeper than easy shenanigans. Cruelty to people who have disabilities or who are gay requires a penchant for stigmatization, an intellectual property that balloons inside unreflective and judgmental human beings.

Do I believe that people can grow? Certainly. But there must be evidence, and given your wholesale support for the Ryan budget plan, a plan that calls for cruel and unnecessary cuts to the social programs that help people with disabilities actually live, I'd say that there's no evidence to date that you've grown one iota. 

I have never thought of blindness as an antagonist, merely the people who make the way harder. Of this I am certain: you know plenty of those folks.

 

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/05/time-when-mitt-romney-was-bully/52151/

 

Stephen Kuusisto 

Article: The Time When Mitt Romney Was a Bully

Yep. Gay people and folks with thick glasses were fair game for the Mittster:

The Time When Mitt Romney Was a Bully

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/05/time-when-mitt-romney-was-bully/52151/

(Sent from Flipboard)

Stephen Kuusisto 

Director

The Renee Crown University Honors Program 

University Professor

Syracuse University

When Bob Marley Saved My Life

Photo description: black and white photo of a smiling Bob Marley.  He’s standing outside and almost appears to be leaning on a guitar, the neck of which he’s holding in his right hand.

First let me say that anyone who has known discrimination also knows that going forward is steep. You have, after all, been told you don’t belong and worse, you’ve been instructed to get the hell out of town. As a blind person I’ve been in that spot throughout my life. Grade school teachers, high school principals, college professors, graduate school instructors–even a college president–have told me that because of my visual impairment I should go away. Perhaps the worst moment was in 1985 when I was enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English at the University of Iowa and two senior faculty along with the department chair told me I didn’t fit, that my need for extra time to complete assignments was ridiculous, and that I was a whiner.

This is a familiar story among people with disabilities. Even today (over 20 years after the passage if the ADA) only one in four college students with a disability will graduate. The unemployment rate for pwds is still estimated at 70%.

If you’re blind you can’t wait tables, drive a cab, or do most of the available jobs that are perfectly honorable. In 1985 all I could imagine was reading and writing vs. nothing. Nothing would mean living on Social Security Disability checks and moving in with my parents. If i embraced Nothing it would be an admission of failure so great that I would have to retire from my life, live as a kind of back room invalid, a prospect that terrified me since my mother was an alcoholic and slept all day with the shades drawn– would that be my life?

As it happened, I did move home and lived for quite some time in my parents’ basement. I had a beat up typewriter, an exercise bike, and a tape machine and that’s when I began listening to Bob Marley in earnest. I’d been gently listening to Bob ever since his first US album “Catch a Fire” appeared in 1973 but now I was soaking in his rare and utterly astonishing combination of rage and redemption, a combination you will not customarily find in the arts–a combo like milk and iodine. In poetry very few possess this–Yeats comes to mind and Nazim Hikmet, and Neruda. In popular music almost no one has Marley’s quality of the sword in the cloud–the rage is just rage or the milk is just syrup.

In my basement with the volume up I began working. Bob Marley’s voice and lyrics moved through me and I felt a half weightless sense of a pending disembodiment and then the authentic tears of deep deep discrimination salted with hope came to me. I could go on and on about the songs, the lyrics stitched from sublime wing shadows of the soul that fans the body, but it’s enough to say that Bob Marley remains for me the most authentic voice of “becoming” that I have ever heard.

Previously published on Steve’s other blog, Planet of the Blind

**************************

Professor Stephen Kuusisto, blind since birth, is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. He has also published “Only Bread, Only Light“, a collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press. As director of the Renee Crown University Honors Program and a University Professor at Syracuse University, Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy.

 

Dear Mr. President, Support People with Disabilities Now

 

 

If you support the U.N. Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities  ask the White house to submit the Convention to the Senate for ratification without delay.   With campaigning under way this critical protection for U.S. Citizens abroad (vacationers’, students, individuals working or doing business) with disabilities is unlikely to get the attention it deserves unless you make yourself heard.   Ratification by September is necessary If the U.S. is going to participate in in a leadership role during the next three years.   If you agree with me and think this is important contact the White House:

 

·         White House Comment Line: 202-456-1111 (TTY/TTD: 202-456-6213)

·         Email White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments

The simple accessible form allows you to send an e-mail.  Please use “Foreign Policy” for the category and ask for a response.

 

Feel free to use the bullet points (or the entire message) below: 

 

I am writing to urge the White House to send the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) to the Senate with haste and to vigorously promote its ratification.  Ratification of the CRPD is a human rights issue; congruent with the administration’s stance, current federal law and U.S. public policy on disability.  In fact obligations under our own laws negate the  concerns over “sovereignty” that are sometimes leveraged in opposition to engaging in international treaties through the U.N.  If the Senate fails to ratify the CRPD, America’s role as a world leader, particularly when it comes to human rights will significantly diminish along with our voice and our influence in international affairs. 

 

It is essential that this treaty be ratified by the US Senate prior to the September CRPD Committee meetings when election that will guide treaty implementation will be held.  The next window with of opportunity for high level  participation and leadership is 2015.  Following ratification, the U.S. will:

·         Have an opportunity for a U.S. disability leader to be elected to the CRPD Committee to guide implementation of the convention across the globe

·         Ensure global initiatives on disability issues and rights will continue to be influenced by U. S. disability leaders

·         Ensure students with disabilities from the U.S. and all countries will have opportunities for accessible, inclusive education including higher education. 

·         Ensure that U.S. travelers, entrepreneurs and employees with disabilites working abroad have can access transportation, housing, retail and commercial facilities.

·         Take its proper place among 112 nations including Australia, Canada, France and Japan in ratifying this 21st century treaty affirming the rights of the disabled around the world, including disabled veterans.

 

Thank you for continuing this work with allows  disabled individuals from our country and around the world to take their proper place in our increasingly global society.. 

Sincerely,

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Bob Marley Saved My Life

First let me say that anyone who has known discrimination also knows that going forward is steep. You have, after all, been told you don’t belong and worse, you’ve been instructed to get the hell out of town. As a blind person I’ve been in that spot throughout my life. Grade school teachers, high school principals, college professors, graduate school instructors–even a college president–have told me that because of my visual impairment I should go away. Perhaps the worst moment was in 1985 when I was enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English at the University of Iowa and two senior faculty along with the department chair told me I didn’t fit, that my need for extra time to complete assignments was ridiculous, and that I was a whiner.

This is a familiar story among people with disabilities. Even today (over 20 years after the passage if the ADA) only one in four college students with a disability will graduate. The unemployment rate for pwds is still estimated at 70%.

If you’re blind you can’t wait tables, drive a cab, or do most of the available jobs that are perfectly honorable. In 1985 all I could imagine was reading and writing vs. nothing. Nothing would mean living on Social Security Disability checks and moving in with my parents. If i embraced Nothing it would be an admission of failure so great that I would have to retire from my life, live as a kind of back room invalid, a prospect that terrified me since my mother was an alcoholic and slept all day with the shades drawn– would that be my life?

As it happened, I did move home and lived for quite some time in my parents’ basement. I had a beat up typewriter, an exercise bike, and a tape machine and that’s when I began listening to Bob Marley in earnest. I’d been gently listening to Bob ever since his first US album “Catch a Fire” appeared in 1973 but now I was soaking in his rare and utterly astonishing combination of rage and redemption, a combination you will not customarily find in the arts–a combo like milk and iodine. In poetry very few possess this–Yeats comes to mind and Nazim Hikmet, and Neruda. In popular music almost no one has Marley’s quality of the sword in the cloud–the rage is just rage or the milk is just syrup.

In my basement with the volume up I began working. Bob Marley’s voice and lyrics moved through me and I felt a half weightless sense of a pending disembodiment and then the authentic tears of deep deep discrimination salted with hope came to me. I could go on and on about the songs, the lyrics stitched from sublime wing shadows of the soul that fans the body, but it’s enough to say that Bob Marley remains for me the most authentic voice of “becoming” that I have ever heard.

New York's Governor Proposes Legislation to Combat Disability Abuse

“We all know that for years our state services have not been doing what they should be doing in this field,” the governor said in a news conference crowded with advocates and a number of people with disabilities, adding, “It’s an unfortunate microcosm of the deterioration of state government, in my opinion, over the past 15 years.”

See full story here.