Planet of the Blind

Senate "Free Rider" Potentially Gives Employers Incentive to Discriminate against the Poor

See: http://www.civilrights.org/archives/2009/08/585-free-rider.html

S.K.

Hat-p-7b

There’s an article at Wired Science that details how the new Kepler telescope is sending data to NASA about planets in our galaxy which are outside our solar system. Such planets are numerous and according to NASA, planet Hat-p-7b has a light side and a dark one and its atmosphere contains titanium oxide–oh yeah, and it has a temperature variance of about 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit between its coldest and warmest points.

Well, ahem, the more I ponder the matter, I think the headlines should read: NASA Discovers “Original Planet of White Men”. Let’s review: global warming out of control; dark side; toxic atmosphere. I’d say that Senator Sessions would feel right at home there. Dick Cheney? Scooter?

That titanium oxide atmosphere assures there will be no hippie dippy flower smelling there. The climate? Reliable in its ruined exactness. Just the way the old white men like it.

There will be no troubling Latina wise women there.

Waves of silvery toxins on the planet’s dark side will assure that nothing needs to be said aloud.

Meantime, back at the ranch…

Beatnik ghosts rattle the locks in the reformatories (which are now called state schools).

Jack Kerouac writes: Charlie Parker, forgive me–

Forgive me for not answering your eyes…

The unsayable names of America’s suffering classes are too hard to pronounce.

The president is going to pitch health care reform as a consumer protection plan.

How many syllables in that illusion?

Whenever I think of the lobbyists in America I remember Jung’s assertion that neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

S.K.

Baring One's Brains to Heaven

The line is Allen Ginsberg’s of course: “who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan/angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated…” (“Howl”)

In spiritual terms once you’ve bared your brains to Heaven you do not cover them up again.

Once you’ve bared your brains to Heaven the meanings will no longer fit subjective expectations.

A bared brain resists concretistic lingo. It sees an albino peacock where a covered noggin sees merely dirty stairs.

The bared brain is unperturbed by its own uselessness.

It has parallel dreams.

First it runs along the sea line; then it IS the sea line.

Its powered by perpetual current.

Its not concerned with wish fulfillment.

Its equally composed of truth and error.

In the water of dreams it is a school of flitting fish called the moment…

This is my origami for Thursday, August 6, 2009. See post below…

S.K.

A Thousand Cranes for Peace

Our friend Vicki Vogt, a librarian at the Perkins School for the Blind sent the following message to us this morning. We are humbled and privileged to pass this along in faith.

S.K.

A Thousand Cranes for Peace
Sadako Sasaki died of Leukemia at age 12 as a result of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1948. In the hopes of getting well, she began her prayers of folding 1000 origami cranes. She wrote of her cranes: ‘ I will write Peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world.‘. Sadako died before she completed her goal. The rest of the world has taken up the prayer of folding origami cranes for WorldPeace.

This is our cry. This is our prayer.
Peace in the World !

Vicki Vogt, Librarian

Perkins Braille and Talking Book Library

175 North Beacon St.

Watertown, MA 02472

617-972-7418

vicki.vogt@perkins.org

The Family Inside Us

Los Angeles

By Andrea Scarpino

On heavy nights, I think about family, its many complexities, how it can feel like suffocation and also safety, or at least a past, a thing that knows you, faults and all. How, wrapped in family, I can feel myself regress, act like a person I used to be, not the person I’m trying to become. I can feel myself slip away.

My mother is 70 years old today. She walks with a cane, is in near-constant pain from fibromyalgia and other complaints. She looks and acts much older than other 70 year olds. She struggles to remember things and lives in her own reality, telling herself impossible stories about where and how she might live, what we might do together if she comes to visit, how she might take care of my niece. Stories that have no hope of coming true. She hasn’t always been a good mother, the mother I would have chosen if anyone had asked. But it’s difficult for me to walk away from her. Mired in her own demons, she did the best she could. I believe that.

My brother is angry though, at our mother. He called the night before her birthday and did nothing but upset her. She’s called me crying three times, asked what he means, why he is angry. I’m caught in the middle, not wanting to insult or worry either of them, and growing angrier myself as the conversations continue. My brother has every right to be angry. She wasn’t always a good mother. But he wants to hurt her like she hurt him, and that doesn’t seem fair, not on her 70^th birthday.

A heavy morning, negotiating pasts, hurt feelings on every side, I look up the word family in the Oxford English Dictionary online. Etymology: familia (household) and famulus (servant). Definition one: “The servants of a house or establishment.” Definition two: “The retinue of a nobleman or grandee.” It’s not until definition five that we get: “the body of persons who live in one house or under one head,” a closer match to how we think of the word today. But my favorite is definition four: “Rom. Ant. A troop, school (of gladiators).” The example is G.J. Whyte-Melville’s 1863 book, Gladiators: “You look as if you belonged to the family yourself.”

Indeed. Family as a school of gladiators, ready to do battle, ready to protect and fight and kill and maim. My father used to say that Roman gladiators wore their swords on their right sides because their arms weren’t long enough to cross their armored bodies and draw a sword from their left. I’m the only Italian in my family, the only one with short arms, my brother’s father different from my own. My mother is taller than me even now, stooped over her cane. She has long, strong arms. My brother is a foot taller than either of us, does martial arts, could break both my arms before I knew what was happening. They’re both better equipped for battle than I am, better able to duel to the death.

I’m of a different gladiator school. Make peace. Forgive. Show gratitude, even if what you have is not what you’d prefer. Fight when need be, but run away too. Try to understand family, even when they’re not interested in understanding you. Leave the past behind, its long tentacles around you still, but gentle now, almost kind.

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

Health Care Reform and Disability Rights

The following article comes to us via The Inclusion Daily Express. We have some comments about it which follow as they say “On the other side”.

State Settles 9-Year-Old Suit Over Waiting List
(Associated Press)
August 4, 2009
MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA– [Excerpt] The state government has settled a 9-year-old lawsuit over the lengthy waiting list to get services for adults with mental disabilities.

‘This is going to be a much more open system for all people who are interested,’ said James Tucker, an attorney for Alabama Disability Advocacy Program, which represented disabled adults in the litigation.

The suit was filed in 2000 and accused the state of violating federal law by not having enough services, ranging from in-home support to group homes.

Robert Regulus of Jefferson County said his 23-year-old son, Jeremy, who has Down syndrome, has been on a waiting list for services since he left public school two years ago.

Entire article:
Lawsuit over Alabama services to disabled settled
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/2009/red/0804c.htm

The laws of this great nation guarantee people their civil rights. Accordingly health care reform is a civil rights issue when considered in the context of aging or the elderly or of children or adults in poverty. You will not hear this assertion broadly in the media–making the connection between the health care reform debate and civil rights is apparently too risky for it is redolent of the game of Russian dolls, each smaller and inserted inside the larger. Health care reform is best discussed as a matter of saving money for our nation. Inside that “doll” you will find another smaller doll, this one betokening a severely shrinking American middle class that cannot afford basic human services of any kind.

(Five or so years ago I spoke with a psychologist who had put up a new shingle: his office was in a wealthy suburb of Columbus, Ohio and his new Welcome sign was in the service of finding elite residential mental health facilities for the troubled children of the very rich. During our talk he said to me: “Not everyone gets to go to Harvard.”)

Inside the shrinking middle class doll is the doll of national survival though you could also call it the doll of St. Stephen for failing to understand this doll will lead to the hurling of stones. The survival of our nation depends on our ability to save the middle classes for America is not temperamentally suited to becoming a banana republic wherein the rich have their private medicine and the rest are left to wander the streets in search of food and medicine according to luck. Yet even if Americans were temperamentally prone to sanctioned heartlessness, our nation’s laws tell another story.

In effect the lobbyists who are spending in a giggling fit to preserve the scarcity model of medical services are actually proposing that the United States should violate its own civil rights protections. Money can accomplish only so much. While the Center for Responsive Politics estimates that the insurance lobbyists have spent 263 million dollars this year to derail health care reform on capitol hill, the story above tells us that the courts will very likely demand fairness in mental health facilities, as well as all programs that provide health care for those who can’t go to Harvard.

It is my belief that President Obama needs to talk to the nation much as President Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This address would argue the evident truth–that our very survival as a middle class country depends on reform “now” and not simply because this will save money but because our courts and laws demand it.

S.K.

Guiding Eyes for the Blind to be Featured on The Today Show

We just received a message from Guiding Eyes for the Blind announcing that tomorrow’s edition of The Today Show will feature a segment on GEB. Tune in!

Home: http://www.guidingeyes.org/site/R?i=_VWfhUY_FsfWWe-EjVLMIw..
Donate:http://www.guidingeyes.org/site/R?i=iLfKkzMs051GAUVr9eFBOg..
About Us:http://www.guidingeyes.org/site/R?i=XDAlC_o6_xOmwIghZsS3MQ..

Be sure to watch the Today Show tomorrow, Thursday August 6 between 8:30 and 9 am. Correspondent and animal lover Jill Rappaport has prepared a wonderful segment on Guiding Eyes for the Blind’s work and volunteer programs.

The Medical Industrial Complex

Bill Peace has written an editorial over at his blog Bad Cripple that raises a number of questions about the relationship between disability and the American medical system.

http://badcripple.blogspot.com/2009/08/medical-industrial-complex-normalcy.html

The intersections between warfare and medicine are of course well known but often the repercussions of these industrialized systems, the human repercussions, are less understood. Bill’s post discusses among other things the ways in which both industrialized systems rely on fear to reinforce their hold over the public.

It is a matter of some interest and importance I think that people with disabilities are largely overlooked in the public discussions of health care reform. This is particularly distressing insofar as one in five Americans currently has a disability of some kind and many more will be joining the ranks in the next decade as the boomers continue to age. Certainly from a policy perspective alone our senators and representatives should be working overtime with the lights ablaze to adopt serious health care reform–and yet the lobbyists are deflecting the absolute seriousness of this matter with vintage fear mongering rhetoric which is straight out of the Cold War. One is reminded of the poet Allen Ginsberg’s litany from “Howl” that the Communists are coming and they’re going to steal your family automobile. Someone is going to steal your current health insurance. We must sacrifice our notion of government as a social contract in order to prevent alien hordes from stealing your magnificent and over priced HMO. Well I digress…

People with disabilities represent the nature of human physical life, a fact that in these United States frightens the bejesus out of the normativity industries which are of course promoting wrinkle creams and plastic surgery and medical ablutions of every kind. Some folks in the disability rights and advocacy communities resent the endless promise of medicine to find cures for disability, believing that a cure factored model of disability as a subjective “medicalized” defect reinforces the abjection of pwds. I too believe this though I’m pro-cure for many disabling conditions. Perhaps more than anything I continue to hold out hope that medicine as practiced in the U.S. will learn from disability studies just how limiting it is to conceive of patients as being merely defective healthy people. Such a position is in fact illusory and untenable insofar as all of life and nature resides in paradoxes. As Carl Jung once said: “Human reality is made up of a thousand vulgarities.” We are each destined to fall apart both physically and all too often emotionally. Medicine which cannot comprehend human suffering and admit that much of it is unsolvable is bankrupt both in spiritual and in financial terms. Very often “less cure” is the better road for a patient.

Another way that the current health care debate can be informed by people with disabilities has to do with the religious truth that we cannot understand a thing until we have experienced it inwardly. PWDs know more about the paradoxes and yes, the calamities, and yes, the ironic gifts of our human bodies than the galleries of lobbyists who champion business as usual.

When I was in Washington DC two weeks ago at an arts pow wow sponsored by the Kennedy Center and the National Endowment for the Arts the participants, most of whom had disabilities, were addressed by a representative from the Obama administration who discussed the President’s decision to sign the United Nations human rights charter for people with disabilities. This was well and good but I noticed that health care was scarcely mentioned and I remain convinced that the dialogue about reforming our health care system is skewed toward superfluous ideas about perfect bodies. If we continue to imagine health care in these terms we can be mislead into imagining that health is just another form of self-help commodity fetishism like wrinkle cream–hence its just a shopping choice and not a human right. Disability teaches us that there are indeed real bodies in the balance.

S.K.

Ought and Disability

The therapist, if he or she is any good, knows that “ought” is the worst possible word during analysis–no one who possesses a modicum of ethos knows what another ought to do with the seemingly inchoate and unsolvable cross-roads of consciousness.

Disability enters another line of calculations on the registry. Factor in another row of numbers and the problem of “ought” becomes a darker problem. I’ve grown to think of this as the swan of the underworld, to paraphrase from old Finnish mythology. The Finns believed that beauty persisted underneath our world, where it glided like a swan over the lake of the dead.

How “ought” a person with a disability (admittedly the signifier of tristesse) plan a life? How ought a professional councilor advise? The problem of “ought and disability” is a rich one to say the least. Its a pregnant problem…

I can’t even tell you how to properly mow your lawn or get a job my friend. I can scarcely accomplish these things myself.

What little expertise I possess resides in the business of writing books. I know just enough about that to keep my nose above the water of cultural inattention.

Yet the thing I care most about is the fight to find jobs for people with disabilities.

The word “ought” strangles me like a Russian verb. It hangs in my low throat. It sticks like peasant bread.

What ought to happen is that he or she who holds a task in hand, who releases birds, or protects them; who raises children; who teaches them; who strives to make the ways forward easier or less encumbered for others–much as Eleanor Roosevelt thought “all” should do–that he or she should be applauded and that many creative ways forward should be possible.

The way to bliss should be easier than it currently is, not just for people with disabilities (who surely deserve a hand in this direction) but for all Americans who wish to take even a small leadership position in the arts of healing our planet and our communities.

I imagine that “ought” is a troublesome word. Art is easier.

Until the United States understands that its a creative nation and a diverse country and that its world leadership will indeed come from this remarkable cultural richness I fear that we will remain caught in the lingo of the dying Victorians, which is of course the lingo of the Republican party.

I ought not tell you what you should be. But Lordy you should have the room to become somebody unique.

Where’s the money to be made in uniqueness? That’s our entire history.

So let’s have a new Works Progress Administration. Let’s bring together the artists, the architects, the people with disabilities, the folks who are thinking hard about the provisional nature of our current state and make a new start, a visionary start for a promising century.

I’m not aware of what “ought” ought to do. But I know wheelchair dancers and deaf-blind poets who would love to talk with people in the corporate sector.

Now is the time for our richness of diversity and able-ness to mean something great.

S.K.

Dancing Wheels in Cleveland, August 20

Get Ready to Awaken Your IMAGINATION…

…as The Dancing Wheels Company presents Imagination, an evening that will delight the young- and the young at heart!

Co-presented by The Dancing Wheels Company and Cain Park/City of Cleveland Heights, the evening will include a mix of world premieres and Company favorites, featuring:

Alice in Wonderland…

Like It’s Never Been Seen Before!

Don’t miss this family-friendly rendition by choreographer Robert Wesner that is quite a departure from Lewis Carroll’s version. With a mix of sassy dance and lively reggae music, it will have you dancing in your seats!

Also featuring:
Big Trucks and Leverage (excerpt) · Stuart Pimsler (’08)

Common Cause · Sara Whale (Premiere)
Crimson · Lisa K. Lock
Variation on a Choice · Carly Dorman &

Sara Lawrence-Sucato

Firefly · Hoang Ngoc Dang (Premiere)

For a sneak peak of the performance of Alice in Wonderland, click here…..

Video Preview

So don’t be late for this very important date! We will see you under the stars!

Who:

The Dancing Wheels Company