Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Best Protest Idea Ever
Accessibility Pledge
AXS Map has a "pledge" you can sign, as a way to encourage you to assess more businesses and send in your ratings. AbleRoad's main strength is that it piggybacks on Yelp, so it may be easier to find businesses to review. Both sites are worth checking out.
International AXS Map Pledge
International AXS Map Pledge
The key thing is that you have to submit reviews. We all have to submit reviews. If we don't, these programs won't work. It's really easy, too, so there's no excuse for not doing this, especially if you find yourself getting angry about barriers you find. If you've found a barrier, then you have something to report. It's that simple. Of course, the opposite is true. If you find a place that’s fully accessible, that’s useful information as well.
I have taken the AXS Map pledge to submit 15 reviews of places in my area, and again I'll be submitting the results to both AXS Map and AbleRoad. I invite my readers to do likewise!
Monday, December 2, 2013
Guilty Pleasure?
This holiday weekend, I’ve been binge-watching a semi-legendary British comedy from the early 2000s called, “The IT Crowd”. It’s not the greatest British comedy I’ve ever seen, but Chris O’Dowd and Richard Ayoade are hilarious, and the whole thing has this strange undercurrent of the surreal that makes it’s rather obvious jokes a little more memorable.
Last night I saw Season 2, Episode 1, “The Work Outing”, which made me laugh longer and harder than any of the episodes I’ve seen so far … but also confused the hell out of me in how it used disability themes.
I have set up the embedded video to start where the disability stuff starts, when Roy decides to use “the disabled” restroom …
The reason I’m confused is that I’m pretty sure this is an offensive portrayal of disability. On the other hand, I read it as a sly satire of peoples’ sentimental attitudes towards disabled people.
Either that, or the thing made me laugh in spite of myself, and I’m trying to rationalize it.
Disability News
Elizabeth Cohen, CNN - November 30, 2013
I have several different feelings about this story. As an individual situation, it sounds very much like the transplant board made a bad decision based on disability prejudice, not medical facts. The result, if it isn’t reversed somehow, will be an example of the ultimate disability discrimination, a preventable death essentially decided by people, because of the disability.
On the other hand, I’m not 100% sure that disability should never be one of the factors considered by these transplant boards. I feel the same way about employment decisions. If disability is an aspect of who I am, maybe it’s okay to include it in your consideration. The key, to me, is to avoid blowing up that one factor into being always the deciding factor, regardless of what all of the other measures and indicators might say. In other words, if all systems are “go” without considering the disability, then disability by itself shouldn’t rule out the transplant. I’d go a bit further and say that in transplant decisions, disability conditions should never be more than a small consideration among many.
The worst thing about this actually seems to be the deception. If the board really believes their criteria and judgments are valid, then they should be upfront about it, and explain them. But they don’t. They make excuses, distort the weight of their reasons, and generally try to get their decision across with as little scrutiny and conflict as possible. That’s a very human motivation, but in addition to being morally wrong, it makes for bad decisions.
Karen Meyer, ABC News Chicago - November 30, 2013
This seems like a pretty important story, explained in a rather superficial article. There is more here about the motivation for the new rules, and the theoretical affect on employers, than on what the new rules actually are. In one sentence, it sounds like federal contractors will be required to have 7% of their employees be people with disabilities. Right after that, someone is quoted saying that employers will have to be "actively seeking to recruit" workers with disabilities? So, is it a requirement, or a goal? What will count as compliance, people hired, or a plan to recruit? And who will count as disabled? These are questions people with disabilities would really like to know. Not to mention federal contractors.
Once again, workaday journalism gets a disability story wrong ... not by being inaccurate, but by asking the wrong questions, or failing to ask the useful ones.
James Lyons, Daily Mirror - December 2, 2013
Which would be worse ... the British Government knowing that their bedroom tax would unfairly penalize people with disabilities, or not realizing that it would? It seems like the main theme of the Conservative / Liberal Democratic government's cost cutting measures is ideas that seem fair and reasonable in the abstract, which are cruel and unfair in practice.
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Solving The Everyday Food Problem
Cutting a bit of time and effort out of everyday cooking makes a huge difference when you have a disability. Doing this in ways that don’t rely solely on frozen dinners and take-out makes life healthier and tastier, too.
Weekly Wrap-Up
This week in "Disability Thinking" ...
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Monday, November 25, 2013
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Thursday, November 28, 2013
- No posts.
Friday, November 29, 2013
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Documentary Trailer
I really want to see this documentary, CinemAbility.
From the trailer, it looks like a very good starting point for discussing disability depictions on film. I wonder how deep the analysis goes? Does it stop with noting the familiar villain / hero cliches, or does it tease out more complex ideas? I also wonder if they look at television, too. I really think you have to.
Hopefully, this will come to Netflix or some other streaming service soon.
From the trailer, it looks like a very good starting point for discussing disability depictions on film. I wonder how deep the analysis goes? Does it stop with noting the familiar villain / hero cliches, or does it tease out more complex ideas? I also wonder if they look at television, too. I really think you have to.
Hopefully, this will come to Netflix or some other streaming service soon.
Friday, November 29, 2013
3 Year Old Me
Thanksgiving is family time, and family time is photo album time.
I was at my Brother and Sister-In-Law’s house for Thanksgiving, and had a chance to look at a couple of long lost family photo albums. One of them included photos from the early ‘70s when I was a very young kid, and these two really blew me away. I was going to bring the albums home, but forgot, so Ian was kind enough to scan and email them to me.
I was at my Brother and Sister-In-Law’s house for Thanksgiving, and had a chance to look at a couple of long lost family photo albums. One of them included photos from the early ‘70s when I was a very young kid, and these two really blew me away. I was going to bring the albums home, but forgot, so Ian was kind enough to scan and email them to me.
These are pictures of me taken in 1970, when I was about 3 years old. I'm not sure who the girl is in the second picture, but Ian thinks she might be someone my parents sometimes hired to help take care of me.
I had had surgery on both of my legs, after which I was in a double-leg cast for several months. The thing I’m in is something my parents thought up, put together by people at a local bike shop, North End Repair, which is now North End Harley-Davidson. It’s made of a standard walker, with wheels attached to the back two legs, two added foldable legs, a series of hooks that attached to hooks on both sides of the cast, so I could be latched into the thing, and a mattress / pillow arrangement for comfort. This configuration allowed for three uses. It could stand me up vertically, tip back for a partial recline position, or become a sort of wheelchair for easy mobility. Since my casted legs were heavy and immobilized, I can't imagine my family looking after me without something like this, yet nothing like it existed as a buyable product at the time. It was pure innovation and resourcefulness, by my parents and a home-town bike and motorcycle repair place.
My Father told me some years later that he tried to get medical equipment people interested manufacturing something like this, but nobody was interested. I’ve still never seen anything quite like it, except maybe for wheelchairs that can stand and recline. Most of those, though, seem a lot heavier and harder to transport in a car.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Disability Thankfulness
I’m thankful that my disabilities have for the most part not included chronic pain.
I’m thankful that I was born with my disabilities, which means I never had to go through the traumatic period of loss, adjustment, and even identity crisis that people do when they acquire their disabilities later in life.
I’m thankful that I was born into a progressive, loving, supportive family that never did or said anything to seriously undermine me, either intentionally or inadvertently.
I’m thankful that my family had the financial resources to provide me with a plentiful childhood, a great education, and a financially secure start in life.
I see that these are mostly about difficulties I haven’t had to cope with. It doesn’t mean that I think my life would have been horrible or impossible if things had been otherwise. It doesn’t mean that I pity or devalue people who can’t be thankful for these things. I'm pretty sure they've got things they are thankful for that I can't claim. I guess what it amounts to is that for better or for worse, I am thankful … on average … for who I am and turned out to be.
A Pleasant Little Surprise!
I think I’m having a disability-related nerdgasm. Sleepy Hollow, that wonderfully batshit crazy, time-shifted, fish-out-of-water, mythology mashup of a TV show, has added a character in a wheelchair! She’s the teenaged daughter of the police chief, a character that’s becoming better and better himself as the show progresses. She might be just a one-time guest character, and I doubt she’ll ever become a main character, but that works fine for me. She seems like a pretty cool person … cool, but normal, neither a super-crip, nor a bitter basket case.
This show pays new dividends every damned week, and this was such a bonus!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)