Planet of the Blind

What is it like to be a person with a disability in the United States some 18 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act?

For my money it’s like those old Peanuts cartoons where Charlie Brown and Lucy are on their backs gazing at the clouds and telling each other what the clouds resemble. Of course in order for that analogy to be effective you will have to concede that Charlie Brown and Lucy each had an invisible disability, but I don’t think that’s a hard stretch.

Unemployment remains high for PWDs but if you look long enough it looks better than that. The ADA has certainly raised the consciousness of employers and the advent of better and cheaper assistive technologies has been a means of employment progress. In turn the people with disabilities who have jobs are very productive and attractive members of the labor force.

Yet the unemployment figures for PWDs remain high. The stigma associated with disability and the lack of substantive managerial knowledge about disability are the most likely causes of these problems but if you’re looking for mainstream political or editorial engagement with the issues you will be hard pressed to find it. A recent event for the presidential candidates of both parties which was held in New Hampshire and was designed to promote discussion of disability issues drew only five of the candidates (Clinton, Biden, Kucinich, Dodd, and Gravel)–John McCain joined the event via telephone and John Edwards sent a representative.

If you’re thinking "Peanuts" you could say: "Well, five candidates in person and two in spirit, that’s a helluva good cloud!" That would be the Charlie Brown position.

Lucy would say: "Where was Obama? And what about Richards and Giuliani, Huckabee and Romney; and what happened to Ron Paul and Thompson and Tancredo?"

Lucy would argue that eight candidates didn’t bother to show up.

Charlie B. would respond that five were there and one was on the phone and another sent a surrogate and that’s a long way from nada.

Both would be correct. The clouds are suggestive.

What did the candidates say about disability?

Senator Clinton spoke about the "ADa Restoration Act" and the "Community Choice Act" and said that she would reintroduce President Bill Clinton’s plan to have the federal government hire 100,000 employees with disabilities.

Senator Biden called for state implementation and Department of Justice enforcement of the Olmstead decision and spoke about Education for All.

spoke about the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), and called for strengthening enforcement of the ADA. He also mentioned affordable, accessible transportation; fully funding IDEA; improving access to telecommunications and technology; he also mentioned his sister Carolyn, who is legally blind.

his single-payer health care plan and his childhood experience with a speech impediment.

discussed the connection between disability and poverty; improving accessible transportation; and fully funding IDEA; reinstating President Clinton’s executive order of hiring 100,000 people with disabilities into the federal workforce.

spoke about his criticisms of representational government and his recommendation that laws be made by the people directly and he mentioned his childhood experience with dyslexia and his adult experience with neuropathy.

called for improving services for returning veterans with disabilities and strengthening the ADA.

Charlie and Lucy watch the clouds in Iowa and New Hampshire and everyplace PWDs live in these United States.

They know that public transportation in this country has never been worse.

They know that despite the Olmstead decision, PWDs are still being denied the basic right to live in their own homes and that thousands upon thousands are being warehoused in institutions against their will.

They are aware that IDEA and other education rights legislation is routinely ignored by school districts and municipalities and that gaining enforcement of disability rights by the Department of Justice is an uphill struggle at best.

They know that veteran’s services are currently in a disgraceful state.

They know that fair telecommunications and access to the "digital highway" is still just a dream for PWDs.

They know that a quarter of a century of diminishing public programs has left PWDs with fewer opportunities for education and rehabilitative services than ever.

They know that these problems do not get discussed on Fox or CNN or MSNBC or the three mainstream networks.

And yet Charlie wants to think that the cloud above the barn is shaped like Thomas Jefferson.

Lucy thinks it looks frighteningly like the entire U.S. Supreme Court which has been largely hostile to the ADA much to the consternation of congress.

Charlie says that seven candidates out of fifteen participated in the New Hampshire event.

Lucy counters that Tom Tancredo has dropped out and therefore there are only 14 candidates and if you subtract the two who weren’t really "there" you have only a 36 per cent participation rate.

Charlie thinks that’s pretty good. He remembers zero.

Lucy says that just about all the candidates are "zeros" when it comes to disability issues but she thinks that Senators Dodd and Clinton and Senators Edwards and McCain are the best of the lot.

"Good grief!" says Charlie, "That’s still a winning hand!"

Lucy says: "Charlie, if you play poker the way you play football, we’re in big trouble."

S.K.

My fellow disability rights blogger, Moggy, brought this to my attention today.

In a recent Slate Magazine obituary of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, writer and composer Matthew Guerrieri absent-mindedly notes that the composer’s disabled mother was “euthanized” by the Nazis. I am choosing to think of Mr. Guerrieri as “absent-minded” rather than being overtly insensitive or worse. Beginning with the infamous T4 project (which was launched on the same day Hitler invaded Poland) the third Reich rounded up people with disabilities and forcibly removed them to state hospitals where they were subsequently gassed. The term for this is “execution” and not “euthanasia” and one would like to imagine that a talented composer like Mr. Guerrieri knows the difference.

German construction workers are still today finding the mass graves of people with disabilities whose remains were buried in the woods behind the hospitals.

Murder will out.

Perhaps you may be wondering why I labor over such a dark subject on this Christmas Eve?

The most obvious answer is that people with disabilities are still struggling for their rights all over the globe. As with all human rights struggles the language we employ really matters.

There is a lot of “ableism” out there in normative society where the temporarily abled imagine that physical perfection is the sine qua non of true life. Ableists think that “the disabled” are living lives of quiet desperation.

In turn, I’m a big fan of the organization Not Dead Yet which fights to make certain that the general public understands that people with disabilities are living rewarding lives, even in the face of the physical and emotional challenges that accompany so many disabilities. 

Although I am essentially a left of center Democrat I sided with President George W. Bush when he attempted to rally Congress in the defense of Terry Schiavo who, as you will recall, was slowly starved to death under the banner of “euthanasia”.

I will never forget that Adolph Hitler called people with disabilities “useless eaters” and I’ll never forget that we have an unjust medical care system in the U.S. which routinely denies appropriate and necessary medical care to the poor.

I can’t use the words euthanasia and disability in a paratactic way. I think that ableist assumptions about the lives of the disabled and the social inequities that surround disability are terrifying.

I suppose you could say I’m having a “blue Christmas” like those folks who were featured this morning on NPR. They ran a story today on “Morning Edition” about an Episcopal church in Washington, DC where the pastor has created a Christmas service for people who are experiencing real grief during the holidays. My hat’s off to those folks. People of conscience feel the pain of life on this blue planet, and for sensitive souls the terrible holiday music and commodified cheer is especially hard to take.

But really, I mean it: I’m not having a blue Christmas. I just want to share the expectation that human rights are supported without exception today and always.

And as Tiny Tim would say: “God bless us, one and all.”

S.K.

Lately I have been endeavoring to send letters of recommendation to colleges and universities across the U.S. on behalf of students who are applying to graduate schools.

I only write letters for those students whose work and preparation will make them successful graduate students and accordingly the process of writing these letters is fairly pleasant. (It feels good to say that Casper Hauser will be a credit to the profession, whatever that profession might be. He has, after all, come a long way from the feral state that characterized his former days.)

The "thing" that does not feel good is the relative inaccessibility of the various online recommendation websites that some of these colleges and universities are now using.

If you use screenreading software for the blind you will be able to access some of these sites, but others are largely inaccessible.

Well that’s no big deal. After all, stores like Target have resisted making their websites accessible for years. Even when there isn’t some kind of organized hostility to electronic or digital accessibility, there’s a cluelessness and systemic inattention to accessibility in all kinds of areas that intersect with higher education. I could go on and on about this topic but I need to maintain my equilibrium today.

Two of these online recommendation sites have form fields that screenreading software can’t engage and when you write the "help" line you actually get an e-mail that asks you to enter your problem in another inaccessible place.

I hold my head. I spit gently into my hanky and proceed.

S.K.

There’s a poem I particularly like by Robert Bly entitled “Eleven O’clock at Night” in which the poet lies down in his bed and wonders about the usefulness of his day. Bly asks the all important question: “What did I accomplish today?”

Some years ago I found a sermon, written by my paternal grandfather—it was in Finnish but the title in translation was: “What Does God Ask of You Now?”

I was only 19 or so when I found that sermon and after translating the title I scoffed. “What a silly, old fashioned and entirely dark sensibility,” I thought. I was “hip” after all, and accordingly I was filled with adolescent despair and a lot of bad ideas from the sixties including “don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

My Finnish grandfather was an immigrant to the United States. He was a Lutheran minister and he offered church services in rural Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and in his later years to the Finns who worked in the leather tanning factories and quarries in Massachusetts.

I have recently heard civic officials in more than one American city say in public that providing basic services to people who have disabilities is too difficult. I won’t name the towns and I won’t disclose the identities of the Babbit-like city council types—at least not for now. There are plenty of blockheads on the planet’s surface and I’ll risk carpal tunnel if I start typing their names.

My point in this instance is that providing special education to kids in our public schools, or putting in accessible curb cuts are no longer “choices” in the old-fashioned sense—at least the Americans with Disabilities Act says so.

Yet all over America (and even in relatively prosperous towns) one sees and hears a kind of adopted scarcity rhetoric when it comes to the provision of basic civil rights.

Here’s how the thinking that I’m alluding to actually works:

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