news – Planet of the Blind

By now you and I have read everything there is about Donald Trump. On the one hand reading about him is a guilty pleasure. But the other hand is a pirate’s hook. No matter how much you understand the nature of his Christo-fascism, his fealty to Peter Thiel, his deep animus toward what, for lack of a better phrase we’ll call the adult world, his seizing of American political corruption for his own ends, finally one has to admit that he’s just a detestable fool and while we’re paying attention to him we’re not seeing the man behind the curtain as in the Wizard of Oz. That man is a thousand men, each possessing untold wealth, and owning beside yachts and private airplanes, all three branches of the United States government. “Why won’t Congress do its job?” Because its owned by the oligarchs who owe everything to John Robert’s and the Supreme Court. Can anyone say “Citizens United?”

Here in upstate New York where I live I notice each morning how few song birds there are. It’s a shiver, a Rachel Carson shiver. The oligarchs are burning down the planet and Dumpty Trumpty is rage posting about whatever hot red herring hits him over the head at 2 AM. Meanwhile, the butter sculpture Prez goes on and on fucking everything up—scientific research, disease protection, environmental protections, international relations, the list is too long for my challenged typing skills. I don’t know about you but I get up in the morning and the immense moldy circus tent of contemporary politics falls on me. This is before I’ve checked the news.

I’ve spent my life fighting against congenital blindness and depression. In some regards this gives me a scoured advantage—one can think of me as pre-stressed furniture. There are tens of millions of us and perhaps, just maybe we can vote the bums out. But the oligarchs have a serious plan to stop this. ICE agents at polling stations, draconian voter registration requirements, jerrymandered districts. Dear John Robert’s: I don’t want to hear you whining about how the public says your Supreme Court is political. We all know who’s stuffing your coffers.

What precisely do the oligarchs think they’ll do when the country has been destroyed at last? I suspect they think their minds will be uploaded to eomputers which will run on the blood of the…oh never mind…never mind…

“You can’t get there from here,” is the old tag line of a well known New England joke. As we celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act the line has been circling my head like a horse fly. In our nation’s higher education arena the disabled are blocked by colleges and universities that don’t take the ADA seriously and in turn do the least amount possible to provide accessibility to disabled students and faculty. And campus visitors. Your grandmother shows up for graduation and needs wheelchair access to the convocation. The doors are locked to the adjacent building where the only ramps and elevators are located. No one can find the key because it’s Sunday. No one is in charge. The maladapted ADA Coordinator is at home drinking a root beer. I know thousands of stories like this. A student requires note takers and the university fails to provide them for over half a semester. She flunks the class. When after months of wrangling the university admits it could have done better, they still take another year to expunge the failing grade. This prevents the student from joining a sorority. The ADA Coordinator is home drinking a root beer. The ADA Coordinator is not a bad guy. He simply has no power to fix anything. He’s the master of a Potemkin village. There are disability statements on the website. ‘If you need access click here” it says on the Information Tech page. Click it, and well, years go by. They’re not equipped to solve your problem with the new Blackboard learning software or the brand spanking new admissions website. Small wonder that only one in four students with disabilities who enter college actually graduates. Small wonder there are so few faculty with disabilities. I’ve railed about this situation on this blog and in meeting after meeting. What’s really interesting is that in the meetings where I talk about these problems no one ever, and I mean ever, says “how can I help?” Even though on the face of it the non-disabled faculty are progressive types, access isn’t important to them.