"Shared Abilities" Blog Post

A Significant Protest By Disabled People: 25th Anniversary

Shared Abilities - March 25, 2014

My most recent blog post at Shared Abilities is up and ready to read. It’s about the 25th Anniversary of the Gallaudet University protests that resulted in the appointment of the first Deaf President of the nation’s premier University for the Deaf, and how it changed how I viewed my own disability.

"We've been dicking around too long!"

Look, I’m not going to reblog every new post about the ADAPT protest in Albany, NY. If you are reading this you can follow events as easily as I can on the Community First Choice In New York blog. But I just had to post this YouTube video of the protesters, who are escalating their occupation of the New York State Nurses Association.

The man who says, “We want them to move the Assembly now. We’ve been dicking around too long!” is Bruce Darling, Executive Director of the Center for Disability Rights in Rochester, and someone I knew when I was an ILC director in New York State. This brings back memories, though none quite like this!

By the way, Bruce was probably speaking off the cuff, but “We’ve been dicking around too long!” could be the new official slogan of the disability rights movement.

Blogging The Protest

Community First Choice In New York

The protest in Albany continues, and now they have a blog, linked above. Given how easy it is to set up a free blog, I’m amazed more protests don’t do this. Twitter seems like the best way to update people as events unfold, but you can’t have detailed policy discussions or manifestos in 160 characters or less. Blog entries can be as long as you want, the print can come from anywhere, and adding photos is dead easy.

This is just really cool.