disability – Page 7 – Planet of the Blind

Reporting from a Thicket of Yellow Roses: Supporting People with Disabilities in the Public Square

I will be speaking on Friday at the annual conference of the New York State Association of Community and Residential Agencies.

Here is what I plan to say:

One night many many years ago I went out and lay down in a thicket of yellow roses. The roses were in the garden of the Prado museum in Madrid. I lay among the flowers on an ordinary day, a day of overcast sun and businessmen hurrying and tall balcony windows shuttered and the streets with creeping taxi cabs.

I had gone alone to the museum because my Spanish friend could not come with me. I was too blind to see the paintings very easily. How do I explain this? Why would a person with an occluding disability undertake a solo hunt to the world of paintings? Here are some answers, offered in no particular order of importance:

• I wanted to see paintings–up close I might have an experience of Goya.

•I thought there might be some kind of tour guide who could describe things.

•I imagined that my passion for life would be equalled by the world: a utopian position that all persons with disabilities must maintain.

The more I think about it it’s answer number three that motivated me. I thought that my desire for an inclusive life would in turn open the world before me. And I still get up every day imagining this.

The Prado museum didn’t have any special accommodations for visually impaired people. So I began walking around. How simple that sentence is! I began walking.

But there were thick ropes in front of the famous canvases. And sinister guards. And I walked from one gallery to another seeing nothing of the art. I saw beautiful mud colored walls and little high intensity lights and then I found myself trailing a group of American tourists who were being led by a woman tour guide. Frankly I felt like a man who had been walking down a mountain on a dirt road. And after great solitude I’d found my people. The tour guide was explaining something about Velasquez. How he used perspective–I don’t remember any more.

What I do remember is the overt cruelty of the woman tour guide who, seeing me trailing her group, chose to confront me by saying, in effect, that I was not part of her group and I should immediately get lost.

I ran from the museum and found my way to the circle of yellow roses and I wept. I cried because I was tired; because I had a disability for which I had only the most apologetic language; cried because I had no allies–my host in Spain had no time for my disability, he was tightly wound and fighting his own battles. And this is what I’m getting at: disability is always and I mean always a problem of imagination. How will I live? How will I belong? What will I do? Who will accompany me? Who will wait on the slope and cheer me on?

Continue reading “Reporting from a Thicket of Yellow Roses: Supporting People with Disabilities in the Public Square”

Essay: Of Wasps and Blindness

The paper wasps fly all afternoon through the ruined woodpile. Some are fast, driven by errands both urgent and mysterious. Others circle a nearby log as if their ancestors had once been there.

It’s risky to get so close when you can’t see. It’s also a thrill.

I sit beside a stump and right off one lands in my hair. He moves across my scalp like a wind blown seed. I shut my eyes, let him go about his business and then he flies.

“Creative Writing and Disability Studies: Liminal Epistemologies”

–“Life is a hospital where every patient is obsessed by the desire of changing beds.”
–Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

What can we learn from poetry about the body and the culture of bodies? Is what we see in a poem merely a figurative illustration of extrinsic historical or political truths or can a poem create a new and unforeseen nexus of identity and consciousness? As scholars concerned with the social construction of disability identity we know instinctively that the answer to the question is determined by our own rhetorical stance toward figuration. A poet is Aristotelian if she’s aiming to look beyond history for the subject of her poem. A poet is essentially Platonic if she is working in the service of verisimilitude. These categories aside we know that Ezra Pound was echoing Aristotle when he said that the poet is “the antennae of the race”. The Aristotelian imagination probes in the unknown space ahead and reports back to the great segmented worm of culture.The poet Richard Wilbur writes: “The mind is like some bat/ Beating about in caverns all alone/ Trying by a kind of senseless wit/ Not to conclude against a wall of stone.” Poetry is instinctive, far-seeing in its peculiar interiority, re-constructing the world that surrounds it. This vision of poetry holds that figurative language is exploratory, (neo)constructionist, progressive, lyrically alive.

Again Baudelaire: “It always seems to me that I should be happy anywhere but where I am, and this question of moving is one that I am eternally discussing with my soul.” One can say that lyric poetry in general is concerned with moving as an operation that defies analysis. The soul is always the totem of irresolvable and competing desires. In poetry the soul is a synonym for the reliquary; it is a place. We position the furniture of our suffering in the soul’s room. But the lyric insists there is life outside the hospital–life beyond the ward. Notice that lyric poetry concerns itself with containment. One can add adjectives that work well with suppression: abject containment, unaware containment, irrational containment—disability studies scholars will recognize this impressionistic terrain as inherently akin to the historic figurative language of disability—the lyric concerns itself with the conditions of individual abjection and is always therefore a fit medium for exploring disability awareness. The modernist Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo wrote the following lyric in the 1930’s as Italy was descending into Fascism:

And Suddenly It’s Evening

Each of us is alone
At the center of the earth,
Pierced by a ray of sunlight,
And suddenly it’s evening.

I don’t know of any more beautiful cris de couer from the Age of Existentialism. My feeling is that lyric discord, rendered almost always in figurative darkness represents the creation of what the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung referred to as “individuation” a state where the conscious and unconscious modes of thought are brought into harmony. The condition of the mind in such poems is fearful, repressed, circumscribed, and lost. The lyric mindscape is blindness whether the poet behind the poem is literally blind or not. The lyric occasion does not represent blindness. It merely works from the epistemological and psychic locus of blindness. I do not mean figurative blindness but the very real step-by-step navigation of the unknown. The urgencies of perception are necessarily reckoned with care.

Claiming disability (Simi Linton’s term) is to claim the lyric. In turn the lyric is the mode of poetry that best resists the falsifications of narrative imprinting. If people with disabilities have been exiled by history, by the architectures of cities and the policies of the state, then the lyric and ironic form of awareness is central to locating a more vital language. The exile that belongs to oneself,/the interior exile…(Richard Howard) We claim disability by lyric impulse. And by lyric impulse we rearrange the terms of awareness. The lyric mode is concerned with momentum rather than certainty. This is the gnomon of lyric consciousness: darkness can be navigated. The claiming of disability is the successful transition from static language into the language of momentum. But of particular importance in this instance is the brevity of the lyric impulse. The urgency of short forms reflects the self-awareness of blocked paths and closed systems of language. The lyric reinvents the psychic occasion of that human urgency much as a formal design in prosody will force a poet to achieve new effects in verse. Igor Stravinsky put it this way: “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution. We are in a hurry. We must tell the truth about the catastrophe that is human consciousness. And like Emily Dickinson who feared the loss of her eyesight we will tell the truth but “tell it slant”—the lyric writer may not have a sufficiency of time.

Poetry about the body looks beyond the constraints of physicality. The lyric is in this manner a metaphysical pursuit. William Blake’s sick rose is the mandala of consciousness:

O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

The body is not our own. In lyric time the body is faced with the urgencies of the Elizabethan memento mori. This self-awareness we describe in terms of the body is equivalent to what disability advocates refer to as the condition of being “temporarily abled” but it’s useful to understand this condition as a crucial circumstance of imaginative and spiritual consciousness.
One thinks of T.S. Eliot’s narrator in “Gerontian”: “I an old man,/A dull head among windy spaces.” How should consciousness proceed in the company of the failing body? This has always been the lyric occasion. In her booklength poem an Atlas of the Difficult World Adrienne Rich writes:

I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

Lyric consciousness is “stripped” consciousness. The word is menacing because the world is invariably opposed to youth, sexual freedom, multi-racial identities, disabilities, the poor…
In Adrienne Rich’s poem momentum and the deciphering of language are equivalent. The lyric occasion demands a larger future because it is the epistemological equivalent of the alphabet—
a new alphabet, one acquired in transition or in pain. Emily Dickinson thinks of this epistemological circumstance as an equation:

I reason, earth is short,
And angu
ish absolute,
And many
hurt;
But what of that?
I reason, we could die:
The best vitality
Cannot excel decay;
But what of that?
I reason that in heaven
Somehow, it will be even,
Some new equation given;
But what of that?

The lyric intelligence is Emersonian, ”transcendental” and concerned with instinctual knowing. Lyric poetry is not inherently opposed to materialism or the body—but neither is it concerned with the body as the figurative representative of spiritual or divine perfection. The broken body is as good as the one without blemish. But what of that? In this view the body is not a vehicle of transcendence. The lyric is akin to Emerson’s “other half” of man—the mind beyond the body’s confining narrative preoccupations with the establishment of a representational self.

As it became a component of English departments the discipline of creative writing began to be understood as the teaching of craft. But the signature work of contemporary poetry has been concerned with the narrative constraints of identity politics and the languages of social enforcement. Poets as diverse as W.S. Merwin, Gregory Orr, Adrienne Rich, Olga Broumas, Primus St. John, Patricia Goedicke and hundreds of others have turned the lyric impulse toward the (re)visioning of social and intellectual freedom. It seems right that in “claiming disability” the work of poets should occupy more than passing interest to the emerging field of disability studies.
In turn the crucial question is “What can (re)visioning suggest in disability terms?”

Walt Whitman is the progenitor of the “disability memoir.” His discovery of lyric prose, first as a hospice nurse, and then as a man experiencing paralysis represents the creation of a wholly conscious rendering of altered physicality in prose. Whitman begins his reminiscence in a wholly new mode. This is not the metaphorized body of the strapping, ideologically constructed man of robust, democratic labor:

Specimen Days

A HAPPY HOUR'S COMMAND
Down in the Woods, July 2d, 1882. — If I do it at all I must delay no
longer. Incongruous and full of skips and jumps as is that huddle of
diary-jottings, war-memoranda of 1862-'65, Nature-notes of 1877-'81, with
Western and Canadian observations afterwards, all bundled up and tied by a big
string, the resolution and indeed mandate comes to me this day, this hour, —
(and what a day! what an hour just passing! the luxury of riant grass and
blowing breeze, with all the shows of sun and sky and perfect temperature, never
before so filling me body and soul) — to go home, untie the bundle, reel out
diary-scraps and memoranda, just as they are, large or small, one after another,
into print-pages. (Whitman 689)

This is the lyric Whitman, the disabled poet working to shape and re-shape his memories as well as his present circumstances. He does so with fragments, jottings, things untied, things untidy, nature notes, bureaucratic memoranda… He is announcing his intention to create a “lyric collage” –and by announcing that this is for the printed page he is also announcing that this is a work of art, one created out of a new urgency.
Here is Whitman again, writing of his increasing paralysis and its effect on his ways of living:

Quit work at Washington, and moved to Camden, New Jersey — where I have lived since, receiving many buffets and some precious caresses — and now write these lines. Since then, (1874-'91) a long stretch of illness, or half-illness, with occasional lulls. During these latter, have revised and printed over all my books — Bro't out "November Boughs" — and at intervals leisurely and exploringly travel'd to the Prairie States, the Rocky Mountains, Canada, to New York, to my birthplace in Long Island, and to Boston. But physical disability and the war-paralysis above alluded to have settled upon me more and more, the last year or so. Am now (1891) domicil'd, and have been for some years, in this little old cottage and lot in Mickle Street, Camden, with a house-keeper and man nurse. Bodily I am completely disabled, but still write for publication. I keep generally buoyant spirits, write often as there comes any lull in physical sufferings, get in the sun and down to the river whenever I can, retain fair appetite, assimilation and digestion, sensibilities acute as ever, the strength and volition of my right arm good, eyesight dimming, but brain normal, and retain my heart's and soul's unmitigated faith not only in their own original literary plans, but in the essential bulk of American humanity east and west, north and south, city and country, through thick and thin, to the last. Nor must I forget, in conclusion, a special, prayerful, thankful God's blessing to my dear firm friends and personal helpers, men and women, home and foreign, old and young."

In lyric terms this prose is necessary to assure the poet’s survival. Gregory Orr’s useful polarities of lyric incitement come to mind: Whitman is experiencing “extremities of subjectivity” as well as the “outer circumstances [of] poverty, suffering, pain, illness, violence, or loss of a loved one.” As Orr points out: “This survival begins when we "translate" our crisis into language–where we give it symbolic expression as an unfolding drama of self and the forces that assail it” –see Orr's insightful book "Poetry of Survival" the most elegant analysis of crisis recast as fragmentary immanence.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Essay on the Politics of English Clarity and Them Folk with Disabilities

One can read theories about stigma, or about the cultural formations of difference. These are necessary and instructive but as I grow older I can’t help but feel our efforts to understand disability as a marginalized human category cannot fully bear fruit without accessing the politics of clarity–an Orwellian thought to be sure but more evident to me now. Do not misread me: I believe in talking back to “the man” and believe in the ardor of revisioning dominant or pejorative narratives, how could a so called “disability” writer be otherwise? Yet I think that the rhetorics of opposition concentrate and then recaste difference until the one who cries out is nearly exhausted with effort. Here I think of James Baldwin’s assertion: “A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.” That there are those who despise people with disabilities seems evident even some twenty years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. That people with disabilities cannot afford to be fooled is a matter for the politics of clarity.

The post-human age may yet give us some new places to roll or stand. The evolutions of cyborgian prostheses will likely help to break down the “normative-abnormal” dichotomy that has dominated both the theory and reality of disablement. Aimee Mullins and Oscar Pistorias have redirected the fashion industry which will inevitably embrace the postnormative. This is all too the good. Yet I think it’s a safe bet that while prosthesis may become no different than the brand of automobile one drives, invisible disabilities or those that produce a public misapprehension about intellectual capacity (blindness, apparent deafness) will remain problematic in the town square. While physical difference can become fashionable, disablement as a capacity of mind is more difficult for the public nerve. In Western tradition we tend to believe in the mind as a substance rather than an essence, we cherish thought that is fast and muscular but denigrate neuroatypical thinking. We believe in “mind over matter” and imagine that those with learning disabilities or who are on the autism spectrum are simply not doing enough pushups.

As I’ve already said, a person with a disability cannot afford to be fooled. The nominative and representational characteristics of invisible disability (or any condition that challenges dominant models of identity and attention) will require fresh language in a new century. Enter Orwell. The politics of language demand precision. In one of the best essays in English on the subject of language and physical difference, Nancy Mairs describes how she arrived at the decision to call herself a cripple:

“"Cripple" seems to me a clean word, straightforward and precise. It has an honorable history, having made its first appearance in the Lindisfarne Gospel in the tenth century. As a lover of words, I like the accuracy with which it describes my condition: I have lost the full use of my limbs. "Disabled," by contrast, suggests any incapacity, physical or mental. And I certainly don't like "handicapped," which implies that I have deliberately been put at a disadvantage, by whom I can't imagine (my God is not a Handicapper General), in order to equalize chances in the great race of life. These words seem to me to be moving away from my condition, to be widening the gap between word and reality. Most remote is the recently coined euphemism "differently abled," which partakes of the same semantic hopefulness that transformed countries from "undeveloped" to "underdeveloped," then to "less developed," and finally to "developing" nations. People have continued to starve in those countries during the shift. Some realities do not obey the dictates of language.”

Mairs writes famously, “as a cripple, I swagger” a position that’s unassailable given the economic abjection in “disability”–that Victorian term still tied to the factories of the Industrial Revolution–it was Karl Marx’s noun for those who lacked the economic utility to be useful workers. Surely “disability” does not swagger. Moreover the word carries no degree or standard of completeness. This is its signature problem for if a cripple is entire, singular, and freed from oppositional enactments with ability, a person with a disability is trapped in a triangle of etceteras–unable, etc; incapable, etc; accordingly, vaguely sub-Cartesian–sans thought, etc. Disability disorganizes conduct and places physicality outside of possibility. So the term has less to do with opposition to normal activity and a good deal to do with a prejudicial conspiracy against the mind. Just as nothing in nature is truly broken, just as evolution defies the normal, there is no proper categorical or taxonomic position that can hypostatize variance or give it a name.

As I’ve said more than once I prefer “world citizen” to disability. I prefer omnimodal essences and motive power.

S.K.

Disability On Theory Road

–after Pentti Saarikoski

In the morning on Theory Road

Ableists and doctrineaire landscapers accosted me

Told me I was sily wanting to go places like everyone else

A little higher up under my apple tree a fawn and her twins nosed fallen fruit

Malice, dressed as a bureaucrat told me to give up

His forehead wavy, eyes quite specific, didn't much like the blind he said

I climbed the steps to the dance floor

Late summer clouds calling me

To dance with them but I lay down on my back

& listened as if my life depended

Down Syndrome Association of Los Angeles Update

Tropic Thunder: What you can do now.
August 12, 2008

Dear Family and Friends of the DSALA:

There has been a tremendous outpour of support for the DSALA’s efforts in regards to concerns over the DreamWorks film "Tropic Thunder" and the affects the language in the film will have now, and in the future, on individuals with Down syndrome and other intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Twenty DSALA members joined a group of 200 in a protest Monday night inWestwood, CA across the street from the Gala Premiere of the film. We were joined by Special Olympics, The Arc, TASH and more.
· Thank you to all who came out.
· Thank you for the volunteer support in our office during this time.

Many of you who were not able to attend the protest or assist in the office have asked what else you can do. Here you go!

Go to a new website set up by Special Olympics and sign up on their site to pledge your support to eliminate the demeaning use of the "r-word." The more who sign up the better, this site will assist us in putting pressure on decision makers in the media and elsewhere. Please forward to all you friends and family and have them support the cause as well.

Take advantage of The Arc website addressing "Tropic Thunder." You can catch up on all the articles and download their chapter "Action Kit" if you are planning a protest event of your own. You can also check their list of upcoming protests to join. Their calendar is being updated by the minute so keep checking back.

LINKS:

Disability News: Boycott Expected, Roundup of "Tropic Thunder" media protest covered, Groups Weigh Boycott of "Tropic Thunder"

Ota Benga Blues

I confess that war, pestilence, natural disasters and the nation’s collapsing infrastructure have recently done a good deal to erode my sense of humor. I’m guessing that you, in turn, likely have your own inner struggles with our blemished planet.

To cheer myself I decided to take a little walk around my neighborhood. The weather was fair after the Biblical Midwestern floods. I was feeling cautiously optimistic. As far as I could tell I wasn’t dead.

Then I met them: a middle aged couple strolling about ten to fifteen yards ahead of me on the sidewalk.

Now you may well ask: “How do you know they were a middle aged couple, etc. since you can’t see worth a damn,” and I’d say to you that you’re absolutely right—they might have been past middle age—they could have been Senior Citizens, or perhaps they were a couple of lumpy Sasquatch wearing Izod shirts and shorts.

And you’d be right to point out this “wrinkle” of veracity not merely in this instance but in all narrative employments rendered by means of my pen.

It’s true: I have no idea what these two individuals look like. But if you want truth I suggest you read the “Style” section of the New York Times.

They were slow. And they were trying to go faster because I was coming up quickly from behind with my guide dog.

Their respective feet suddenly went “skippy-scuppy, skippy scuppy” and I could hear the drape of their considerable shorts making “zith zith” noises.

Yep. They were almost running to stay ahead of me. Then they reached the perpendicular turn that I was planning to take, and sure enough: they stopped and spun around (shorts making little gulping noises) and they stared as I came toward them.

In the split second when they might have said “Hello Citizen” or “Boy Howdy Pardner!” they said nothing. They were staring. They were also blocking the very turn I was planning to take and since they had enough time to look at me and say something and chose instead to say zilch I felt the old “creepy crawly disabled person being stared at by toddling pink people blues”.

It happens sometimes. I have a nickname for these kinds of people. I call them “Bob and Betty Boop”.

Continue reading “Ota Benga Blues”

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"

Who are the Political Friends of People with Disabilities?

ADA Restoration Headed to House Markup on Wednesday
ADA Restoration Moves Forward in the House
Disability, civil rights and employer groups are working hard to secure support for the negotiated legislated language that has been circulated on JFA and now has the support of more than 50 national and 60 state and local disability groups, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Society for Human Resource Management, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Human Resource Policy Association, and a growing list of companies, including McDonalds, General Motors and Honeywell. Lobbying on the House side for this negotiated deal began in earnest yesterday, focused on the members of the House Education and Labor Committee and the House Judiciary Committee (which also plans to mark up the bill next Wednesday).

To avoid confusion with the bill that was introduced last July, we have begun referring to the negotiated legislation as the ADA Amendments Act. In anticipation of next week’s markup, we are working to counter any efforts in either committee to attach an ADA notification requirement to the bill, a cause that was championed in prior Congresses by Representative Mark Foley of Florida and that is strongly opposed by the disability-civil rights employer coalition working to enact the ADA Amendments Act. We are also working hard to secure White House and Senate Republican support for the negotiated bill.

:::TAKE ACTION:::
At this point, it looks like the bill will receive strong bipartisan support in the committee markups in
the House. We have included a list of the members of the House Education and Labor Committee and the House Judiciary Committee below.

· Contact Members on the House Education & Labor Committee and the House Judiciary Committee between now and Wednesday morning and urge them to support the bipartisan negotiated language that will become the Chairman’s mark in both committees. The names are below.

Locate the Members’ contact information online, or call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-1904 (V) / (202) 224-3091 (TTY) and ask to be connected to their offices by name.

· If you haven’t already, consider having your organization "sign on" to the proposed deal language by sending an email to Anne Sommers, JFA Moderator, at aapdanne@earthlink.net. Support of the deal language means you not only approve of its language and terms, but that you also agree to defend it against all attempts by Members of Congress to amend it–unless both sides agree to the amendments.

We will continue to share the list of organizational support with Members of Congress as ADA Restoration moves forward in both the House and Senate in coming weeks.

· Attend the markup! The House Education and Labor Markup is scheduled for Wednesday, June 18th, at 10:00 in the Rayburn building, Room 2175. Advocates are encouraged to show their support through numbers. The accessible entrance to the building is the main entrance with the horseshoe drive off South Capitol Street.

Continue reading “Who are the Political Friends of People with Disabilities?”

Disability and Language: a NY Times Article Review

This comment was left on a post by William Peace on his blog, Bad Cripple. Therextras wrote " Thank you for an excellent expose of a typical media dissemination of
language and attitudes we would like not only to reform but squelch. I
hope you sent some response directly to the newspaper."

Team [with]tv would like to second that remark.

Here is an excerpt from William’s post.

Monday, May 12, 2008

Disability and Language

Yesterday a long article appeared in the New York Times entitled
"Taking a Chance on a Second Child". The article was written by Michael
Winerip, a Pulitzer Prize wining writer. Mr. Winerip is a seasoned
reporter, graduate of Harvard University and a gifted writer. Yet a day
later I remain stunned and outraged by the language Winerip used. The
article in question is about Jordana Holovach, her son Jacob who is
severely disabled, and her decision to have a second "healthy" child.

The
tone of Winerip’s article is shocking. Each and every mention of
disability is overwhelmingly negative. The language is antiquated,
insulting, and devalues the life of a child and by extension all
disabled children and adults. Among the snippets I found particularly
appalling include the following:

In referring to Ms. Holovach’s son: "And as much as she loves that boy
and as hard as she’s worked to make him whole…she felt snake bit"

Ms. Holovach’s son is "confined to a wheelchair".

Ms.
Holovach’s son was responsible for her divorce: "Her first marriage
ended in divorce under the strain" and "Jacob was a big reason".

Before Ms. Holovach’s son was born "they were successful people" (note tense).