Tag: ADA

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

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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.

 

ADA Restoration Act Clears Hurdles

While you won’t hear much about it from the national press the “ADA Restoration Act of 2007” cleared two House committees yesterday with only one opposing vote. (I’ll have more to say on that in a minute…) 

You can read all about yesterday’s proceedings and learn a good deal about the history  of the “ADARA” at the website of the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD):    

It is heartening that in a time of divisive squabbling in Washington the cause of Americans with disabilities has once again “shown the way” for true bi-partisan legislation and negotiation.

Disability is universal—it transcends race, class, gender, point of origin, sexual orientation, social status, age, fortune, and happenstance. Just so: the lives and concerns of people with disabilities are in fact the most logical point of “ethos” for a largely divided country to reassert its American values of fairness and decency.

While you wouldn’t always know it from the strident qualities of my prose I am at heart an optimist about the United States. I have lived to see kids with disabilities get a real chance in public education—when, not so long ago I was one of those “mainstreamed” kids who struggled without civil rights or appropriate educational supports. Yes, we’re a decent nation. We’ve come a long way in many areas. There’s reason for  a positive outlook. And yes, there’s also reason to stay strident. Rights and liberty are inconvenient for the ruling classes and we forget this at our peril.

“Aw, c’mon, Kuusisto, you don’t really think we have a ‘ruling class” in the United States, do you? I mean, don’t you agree that we’re a ‘classless society” etc. etc.?”

Continue reading “ADA Restoration Act Clears Hurdles”

Civil Rights for People with Disabilities vs. “The Usual Suspects”

Right now, even as we drink our coffee there are powerful forces working overtime on Capitol Hill. I like to call these forces “the usual suspects” because I love the old TV series “Dragnet” and also because it takes too long to type all the acronyms of the various business and human resources lobbying groups that have assembled to fight the “ADA Restoration Act”. Oh yes, and there are prominent corporations opposed to the full inclusion of people with disabilities in the workforce.

The Usual Suspects are opposed to the legislation because it would require that employers actually make reasonable accommodations for employees who have disabilities—rather than allowing said Usual Suspects to proclaim that these accommodations are wildly unreasonable. Why, By Golly! even reassigning a disabled employee to a different but equal job is an undue burden on said Usual Suspect. Enter the extraordinary, well funded, hence powerful Allied Usual Suspects who are working like junior attorneys to “mark up” the bill.

Their aim? To do to the “ADA Restoration Act” what the Supreme Court has done to the original ADA of 1990.  In decision after decision the Supreme Court has exonerated employers from having to make workplace accommodations for disabled employees. The court has used a cynical  loophole when deciding “for” employers against disabled workers: they’ve argued that Congress, in adopting the ADA has assumed the power to regulate commerce within the respective U.S. states—in effect the conservative majority on the court has asserted that Congress doesn’t have the authority to legislate civil rights for people with disabilities—and by extension, for any other group.   

What’s the final final rationale for such a position? Why by God if you give one disabled employee an accommodation well then, by God you’ll have to give all the differently abled people accommodations and heck, that would mean living up to occupational safety and human rights standards and that’s an undue burden on capitalism which, it turns out, doesn’t always see the opportunities for new markets.

So what you do is declare the authority of Congress null and void. You do it by the process of red herring-ism, you confuse the public that the issue is about disabled people in the workplace who are always a suspect group in the view of the general public—aren’t these people faking something? Trying to get an advantage with a better parking space?

If Americans don’t demand of their Congress true accountability on behalf of our nation’s disabled citizens then they are in effect giving away the last measure of our civil rights—the stakes in this argument are really that important.

Write to your Congressman or Congresswoman; take a stand. Don’t let the “usual suspects” continue to evade social responsibility by means of obfuscation.

S.K.

LINKS:

"Permanent Link to ADA Restoration Act Blogging Round-Up, Feb 11-28 ‘08"

The Wheelchair Runningback

Alright, I admit that I haven’t had enough coffee. Accordingly there are cobwebs in my belfry. But here’s the thing: I go to bed with a disability and when I wake up I still have it. And in turn this means that even in the half awake-half asleep intersection, the state that Edgar Alan Poe admired, I am still blind. I am blind when counting backwards by sevens. I’m blind when I watch the TV.

The experience of disability is invariably the “half-awake-half asleep” World view of Edgar Alan Poe: at once terrifying, revealing, darkly beautiful, unforeseen, foreseeable, sacred and profane, you name it. Disability defies our notion of stable space both in physical and metaphysical terms. Disability is the sore thumb of a saint: it reveals where culture must go if society will be just. And yes, people aren’t ready for it.

I remember being in a meeting some years ago with administrators whose job it was to provide services for the blind. The meeting had something to do with hum drum budgetary matters. I was the only blind person in the group. Everyone was talking about the legal battle between Casey Martin, a professional golfer who had sued the Professional Golfer’s Association over the right to use a golf cart during PGA sanctioned golf matches. Casey Martin won the right to use a motorized cart as a means of getting from one tee to another—a right that was eventually upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices agreed with Martin’s assertion that his disability didn’t prevent him from hitting a golf ball and they disagreed with the PGA’s assertion that allowing Casey Martin to ride from one spot to another would fundamentally alter the nature of the game. I agreed with the Supreme Court on that occasion and I was surprised by the evident distress of the other men in the meeting. They felt that allowing Casey Martin to ride in a golf cart from one fairway to another would radically destroy professional golf.

Continue reading “The Wheelchair Runningback”