Tag: Disability

The shape of things to come?

Technically, today begins the 7th calendar year of this website’s existence. Which is abundantly surreal, actually. And, as insignificant as that first sentence may be (read: is), I’m marking this anniversary by launching the site’s 3rd official re-design. Bam (that was a not so subtle hint to those who have stumbled on my words in a feed reader, say, to get on a modern web browser and see what I’m talking about)!

And so the current iteration of this blog, rather obviously, leaves the former behind. My point, while my former “skin” was extremely stale (I’d argue, if not right out of the gates, very soon after), it served me very well. Exceptionally well, in fact. Farewell my old friend. It’s been a blast! But, if I might be frank, it didn’t really meet with as many of the design objectives as I’d have liked (way more on that than is even remotely called for in a bit).

And now we have this effort. It entailed much more than a reshuffling for appearance’s sake. It was a complete re-development from the ground up. HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, plus some neat little WordPress optimization tricks (does this site seem a tad snappier?) thrown in, for good measure. Or, in other words, I ripped it all out, and started fresh.

With more, of everything, still to come…

Continue reading The shape of things to come?

The Shoe and The Other Foot

Would you get a load of this? This is my 300th post. And as it just so happens I got something pretty interesting — well I think — to write about, too. Huh.

Yesterday a friend forwarded me a link to a BBC article about a “Locked-in” man’s right-to-die. She was interested in my take. Seeing how I was once in nearly the exact same predicament — although Tony Nicklinson’s “syndrome” sounds like the Cadillac model of the “syndrome” I experienced, he can eat and nod, I couldn’t. However the more I contemplated the story, and the complex issues seemingly at hand, the more convoluted my stance became.

I’ve written about this issue previously, at the beginning of February of last year Eluana Englara, an Italian woman in the throws of a “17 year coma, as a result of a car accident,” and was having her “fate,” if you will, decided by people other than herself. Simply because she wasn’t in the position to make her wishes known. I’ll say it again, this was, and always will be, a very complicated issue. One for which there is no easy answer…

Continue reading The Shoe and The Other Foot

“Why Resist the G20 in Toronto?”

Today, over at If I Can’t Dance Is It Still My Revolution, A.J. Withers, “a disabled anti-poverty activist living in Toronto,” posted the transcript of a speech given at the recent Toronto vs. the G20 teach-in, Why Resist the G20 in Toronto? In part;

“Disability is NOT the story of an individual tragedy. […] Disability is an identity imposed upon people as a tool of marginalizing people. It is not a biological reality or a scientific definition; it is a political definition. […] In a world without stairs, using a wheelchair would not be considered a disability, it may even be considered an advantage. In a world where everyone knows sign language, Deafness would not be a disability.”

“Capitalism thrives on the notion of individuality, that each of us must support ourselves, that strong communities that operate on the basis of mutual aid and support are not only bad, they are a threat. This is an especially important colonial ideology as it sets out to destroy communities and collectivity and replace them with individualism and capitalist systems.”

“This ideology, however, is a lie. All of us, under capitalism or not, are interdependent. We all rely on each other. However, the ideology of individualism says that certain kinds of relationships are good and others are bad. Those involving financial transactions are good while those without the exchange of collateral is bad, dependency and a drain not only on our economy but our society. It is these types of relationships that many disabled people seek to establish as these collective supports are what many of us need to thrive. So, disabled people pose a threat to capitalism: if interdependence takes hold as a stronger than independence, capitalism as we know it will begin to unravel. This is why disabled people are particularly compromised and targeted by the policies of the G8 specifically as well as the broader G20…”

A lot of what was said wasn’t new to me, some I’ve even written about here (the bit about everyone needing each other’s help, how we’re all “interdependent”), but framing interdependence under the guise of capitalism, and how it is actually contrary to the notion of individuality — capitalism’s whole schtick — is something I’ve never much thought about. Especially in relation to the G8 And G20.

But now I will, seeing how I now much better understand its implications…

Keep Your Eyes On This Creep

Speaking of dick-bag’s. For some context, I wrote about The Lunatic Dick-Bag Fringe (a.k.a. the extreme American Right-Wing — which isn’t all that “extreme” these days, it’s seeming more and more like the norm) near the start of this month. Then again, last week, following Rand Paul’s primary victory in Kentucky. What a piece of work this idiot is turning into. I’ll just cite what Mike Ervin, “a freelance journalist and a longtime activist with the disability rights groups ADAPT,” so curiously asked;

“Saying something like, ‘If you have a two-floor business and you hire someone that uses a wheelchair’—like me—’that the federal government would automatically come in and demand that you install a $100,000 elevator,’ is ridiculous […] So the kind of solution that he came up with, of giving somebody a first-floor office, would be exactly the kind of thing that the ADA would say that you should do, and it would be within the law. So, to go around making people think that the ADA is this big boogeyman that makes people—makes private businesses go through these huge changes, they’re going to bankrupt them just to accommodate someone in a wheelchair like me, is either ill-informed or purposely misleading […] [W]hat he’s saying is that every private business has the right to say, ‘We don’t want you in here. Get out of here. ‘And we’re getting back to the old lunch counter problem again. Yeah, I think that most people would disagree with him quite significantly on that, you know, that little steps, which are often all that is required—little steps should—no affirmative steps should have to be taken at all to make it possible for someone who uses a wheelchair or someone who uses a service animal. Should a private sort of person who owns a restaurant or a store be able to say to a blind person who needs a dog to get around, ‘Get out of here; no dogs allowed in my store or my restaurant,’ and thus tell the blind person they can’t come in? Are those the kinds of things that he’s talking about? Should the cab company that makes money operating in my city be able to say, ‘We don’t want to have any wheelchair-accessible vehicles, and we don’t care if you get around just like everybody else’? Is that really the kind of thing that he’s talking about?”

Keep your eyes on this creep, his shifty talk, and his curly hair. I just don’t trust people with curly hair…