Jon Town has spent the last few years fighting two battles, one against his body, the other against the US Army. Both began in October 2004 in Ramadi, Iraq. He was standing in the doorway of his battalion's headquarters when a 107-millimeter rocket struck two feet above his head. The impact punched a piano-sized hole in the concrete facade, sparked a huge fireball and tossed the 25-year-old Army specialist to the floor, where he lay blacked out among the rubble.
"The next thing I remember is waking up on the ground." Men from his unit had gathered around his body and were screaming his name. "They started shaking me. But I was numb all over," he says. "And it's weird because... because for a few minutes you feel like you're not really there. I could see them, but I couldn't hear them. I couldn't hear anything. I started shaking because I thought I was dead."
Eventually the rocket shrapnel was removed from Town's neck and his ears stopped leaking blood. But his hearing never really recovered, and in many ways, neither has his life. A soldier honored twelve times during his seven years in uniform, Town has spent the last three struggling with deafness, memory failure and depression. By September 2006 he and the Army agreed he was no longer combat-ready.
But instead of sending Town to a medical board and discharging him because of his injuries, doctors at Fort Carson, Colorado, did something strange: They claimed Town's wounds were actually caused by a "personality disorder." Town was then booted from the Army and told that under a personality disorder discharge, he would never receive disability or medical benefits.
Town is not alone. A six-month investigation has uncovered multiple cases in which soldiers wounded in Iraq are suspiciously diagnosed as having a personality disorder, then prevented from collecting benefits. The conditions of their discharge have infuriated many in the military community, including the injured soldiers and their families, veterans' rights groups, even military officials required to process these dismissals.
They say the military is purposely misdiagnosing soldiers like Town and that it's doing so for one reason: to cheat them out of a lifetime of disability and medical benefits, thereby saving billions in expenses.
Journalist Stuart Hughes, who blogs at Beyond Northern Iraq, writes for the BBC News on Heather Mills -- "Heather: Amputee Inspiration or Irritation":
Even when I had two legs I was no dancer, so the idea of fox-trotting, tangoing or cha-cha-cha-ing in front of an audience of millions is unthinkable to me.Jean Chambers at Philosophy Now reviews Martha Nussbaum's Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership:
And aside from the issue of whether she is merely trying to rebuild her tarnished image after her bruising separation from Sir Paul McCartney, I admire her determination to take on the bipeds at their own game.
One gambling website is taking bets on whether Mills' leg will fall off during the series, pointing out her prosthesis "must fall off, not be purposely taken off, during a dance routine for all Yes wagers to be graded a win". If you want a betting tip from me, put a tenner on her prosthesis staying firmly attached.
The current generation of prostheses are secured with tightly-fitting silicone liners fitted with pins or suction seals, which roll onto the skin like a sock. The chances of Heather's flying into the audience during a high kick are precisely zero.
The ‘frontiers’ of Frontiers of Justice are three social frontiers at the edge of the political community as it has been defined by social contract theorists such as Rawls. The early social contract theorists Thomas Hobbes,John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau posited free and independent men, roughly equal in power, living at first in a pre-social ‘state of nature’. Such men would have had little reason to form a society and submit to the authority of laws unless they could individually benefit from giving up their absolute liberty. Therefore the only social contract they could rationally agree to would be a mutually advantageous one. But this familiar scenario has tended to exclude from the resulting polity anyone who it might not be mutually advantageous for such men to cooperate with – anyone who is not free, not equal, or not independent. Nussbaum claims that people with disabilities, citizens of other nations, and non-human animals have thereby been banished by contract theorists to the frontiers of social justice.
People with disabilities may not be free or independent; and those with severe mental disabilities may be unequal. Nussbaum argues that such people should nevertheless be considered full citizens entitled to dignified lives, even if no one could gain from cooperating with them. She notes that the social contract tradition has always denied the reality of dependency, despite the obvious fact that everyone is dependent on others during infancy, old age, injury, and illness. Historically women have done most of the largely unpaid work of caring for dependents, so by ignoring women, the social contract theorists conveniently evaded the thorny issue of justice for dependents and caregivers. Nussbaum argues that justice for people with disabilities should include whatever special arrangements are required for them to lead a dignified life, and the work of caring for them should be socially recognized, fairly distributed, and fairly compensated.
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