I feel sad, too, though unrelenting rage is more appropriate

Many who blog about autism have written about Alex Barton, the Florida five-year-old, whose Kindergarten teacher led his classmates in voting him out of the class after she also had the students tell him, as he stood at the front of the class, what they didn't like about him. From a news report:

After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn't like about [Melissa] Barton's 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher Wendy Portillo said they were going to take a vote, Barton said.

By a 14 to 2 margin, the students voted Alex — who is in the process of being diagnosed with autism — out of the class.

Melissa Barton filed a complaint with Morningside's school resource officer, who investigated the matter, Port St. Lucie Department spokeswoman Michelle Steele said. But the state attorney's office concluded the matter did not meet the criteria for emotional child abuse, so no criminal charges will be filed, Steele said. . . .

Barton said after the vote, Portillo asked Alex how he felt.

"He said, 'I feel sad,' " Barton said.

Alex left the classroom and spent the rest of the day in the nurse's office, she said. . . .

Alex hasn't been back to school since then, and Barton said he won't be returning. He starts screaming when she brings him with her to drop off his sibling at school.

Thursday night, his mother heard him saying "I'm not special" over and over.

Barton said Alex is reliving the incident.

The other students said he was "disgusting" and "annoying," Barton said.

"He was incredibly upset," Barton said. "The only friend he has ever made in his life was forced to do this."

Last Crazy Horn at Odd One Out is compiling a long, impressive list of posts on this news story as well as links to some resources responding to the topic.

Hiya gawkers!

Yesterday I went to Great Clips to get my hair cut. The hairdresser I've had for the past year got a job at the local bank around Christmas, so I've been badly in need of a trim. But I was also very conscious that in the two years I've had a trach and used a vent I have never gone anywhere "cold" and required a non-medical person to, well, touch me.

Knowing how weird people can be about wheelchair users, I expected a wheelchair user with a trach and vent would make the experience even more of an adventure. I was so right. The level of gawking -- outright staring -- from people less than five feet from me far surpassed anything I've experienced in my 25 years of being visibly disabled.

People stare all the time, right? Three women, close enough for me to reach out and kick them, sat or stood with their jaws hanging down as they stared. And stared. For several very long minutes. It may have been much longer. I had to look away from the rudeness.

I've felt comfortable challenging that in the past, at the very least with a pointed look back, but this time I found myself unprepared and struck silent. I looked back and found absolutely no recognition that they were looking at fellow human being. They stared like I was an alien or three-headed dog. My nurse, a smart outspoken woman, was stunned into silence too.

Then I got busy with what I came there for and the calm business manner of the woman who shampooed and cut my hair. But I felt the Othering shame of those stares in a way I haven't for a couple decades. And here I thought I had this worked out. Damn.

Friday Music: The Blind Boys of Alabama

The Blind Boys of Alabama are an old-school gospel group that's been singing and touring since 1939. Yeah, 1939. That's a lot of cultural and music business changes to weather over seven decades. Originally called the Happy Land Jubilee Singers, the five original singers (Jimmy Carter, the current lead singer, has been with the group since it began) met at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind in Talladega.

Clarence Fountain, another founding member, recalls the early years while the singers were still attending the institute: "The school was not happy for us to go off campus, but we would sneak out," Fountain told Folk Roots interviewer Dave Peabody. "We would go out and make some money. There was a big soldier camp up there,had about ten or twelve thousand soldiers. We'd perform for that soldier camp and we'd do alright."

On the band's name change, Fountain says, "For a while we called ourselves the Happy Land Singers and we toured all around the country. Then a promoter put us on a show with another blind group, the Jackson Harmonies from Mississippi. He billed it as a contest between the blind boys of Alabama and the blind boys of Mississippi. The name worked good so we stuck with it."

Known for remaining contemporary and collaborating with many mainstream artists while keeping their traditional gospel sensibilities, the Blind Boys have won four Grammy Awards and their most recent album, Down in New Orleans was released earlier this year.

People not apt to listen to gospel music might know the Blind Boys from their cover of the Tom Waits' song "Down in the Hole" that was the theme song for HBO's drama The Wire. (The show has used a variety of covers of the tune, with the Blind Boys' version used in season one.)


YouTube has a wonderful selection of video performances:

"Something Got A Hold On Me" -- a 1960s live performance
"Too Close" -- the same early-to-mid 1960s performance venue
"Look Where He Brought Me From" -- a live performance in a church, I think, maybe in the 1970s
some old-fashioned musical testifying at an outdoor concert or tent revival
"Run On" -- live 2001 performance on the British tv show Later
"Amazing Grace" -- their live version sung to the tune of "House of the Rising Sun," and here's a studio version someone has set to images of Black American history
"Satisfied Mind" -- Ben Harper & Blind Boys of Alabama performing live (There Will Be A Light, Harper's album with the Boys came out in 2004)
"Shall Not Walk Alone" -- with Ben Harper, video is of a recording studio performance
"Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb" -- the video is some cute, quirky animation (2005 album Atom Bomb)

Source

Slumgullion #44 -- Voter ID edition

Here's a bunch o' links on the issue of voter identification, specifically photo ID, and how it impacts disabled people and other folks:

"Take This And Weep" -- Steve Kuusisto at Planet of the Blind comments on the U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling allowing Indiana's requirement of photo ID for voters in that state.

"The (GOP's) War on Voting Right" -- Perry Dorrell at Brains and Eggs offers a collection of statistics on which Americans are most effected by photo ID requirements. (The League of Women Voters says up to 11% of Americans lack photo ID.)

"More of the Same" -- Mark Siegel at The 19th Floor notes that the story of a South African woman who was denied ID because she has no arms and local bureaucrats required her to submit fingerprints isn't dissimilar from his own experience five years ago here in Minnesota. In both cases, disabled people clearly weren't expected to ever show up and participate in their community as officials had given absolutely no thought to their existence.

"The Politics of Mobility" -- Ruth Harrigan at A Different Light relates the recent story of the elderly nuns in Indiana who were turned away from the polls for lack of proper ID to lack of mobility for many different Americans.

"Is the Supreme Court trying to swing the election?" -- Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman at AlterNet write about how the ruling on Indiana's photo ID requirement disenfranchises mostly Democratic voters.

"Was Justice Stevens' Water Spiked?" -- Archcrone at The Crone Speaks wonders what the hell Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens was thinking when he joined the majority in the vote.

"Voter ID law disenfranchises Americans" -- Mai Thor writing for the Minnesota Daily also summarizes the impact of the Supreme Court ruling.

Got another link about photo ID and voting? Share it in the comments.

And here's an important new(ish) link to check out:

Crimes Against People With Disabilities is a new blog designed to document and catalog the crimes often considered unrelated to disability prejudice and ableism. It joins the recent UK Disability Now magazine Hate Crime Dossier in an effort to connect the stories of abuse and death to show the larger picture of hate crime against the disabled.

Things that crack me up #39

Cilla at Big Noise cracks me up. After my last published edition of what afflicts me with the chuckles, Penny at Disability Studies posted a similar example of restroom signage discrimination where disabled guy is denied clothes. So, Cilla created this Wheelchair Cowgirl for me. Take that half-naked nondisabled Hawaiian guy and Knott's Berry Farm Cowboy Dude!

Image description: Cilla's artwork takes disabled guy, the basic universal disability access symbol, and gives him a cowboy hat, sheriff's star pinned to his chest, fringed chaps (showing the fringes on the underside of his thighs), kickass cowboy boots with spurs, and a lasso swinging in the air from his arm. She's beautiful. Thanks, Cilla!

Check out the 37th edition of the Disability Blog Carnival

Did you know that Dorothea Lange, famed Depression-era photographer, had polio and that her experience with disability informed her work?

Ms. CripChick presents the latest Disability Blog Carnival on Disability Culture and Identity: "Here They Come!"

“I think it was perhaps the most important thing that happened to me. It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, humiliated me, all those things at once. I’ve never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it.”
—Dorothea Lange on disability

Over 40 bloggers weigh in on how the shared history, struggle, and culture of disability inform personal and group identity. This is an impressive collection of varied explanations on how what is viewed as a deficit by mainstream culture can be a binding force and a cause for celebration. Go and read.

Image description: The icon above, provided by CripChick, is a color image of a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo with the words "DISABILITY BLOG CARNIVAL" in bold black type across the painting. The image is a close-up of Frida in her wheelchair from the 1951 painting "Self-Portrait with Portrait of Dr. Farill" described in detail in both English and Spanish here.

Cross-posted at Alas, A Blog

Happy Cinco de Mayo

Apparently, "wheelchair guy" in Mexico is more interesting than his relative to the north.
















Image description: Two identical simply-stenciled images in bright red paint on a wall. The universal wheelchair access guy holds a gun (rifle, machine gun?) in an upraised hand as he sits inside a five-pointed star. Posted at Flickr by rsinghabout, the image is indexed under "San Cristobal," "Chiapas," "Mexico," "2007."












Image description: On the slope where a sidewalk ramps leads into a street in Mexico City, Mexico, a variation of universal wheelchair access guy is stenciled in black over yellow paint. This guy faces left instead of right and has a very large round head. Posted on Flickr by daquella manera.












Image description: On a large post painted green a round white stencil graffiti painting. The background of the image is white and the wheelchair guy is the color of the green post. He's a completely stylized version of the universal symbol, facing left. He has a very large oblong head with giant eyes, like an alien or maybe a Day of the Dead skeleton. He doesn't appear to have legs but his torso looks a little like ribs, though that may be a function of the illustration since the chair cushion, the chair's arm and the guy's body are all the same color green and each is cleverly articulated despite he drawing's simplicity. The manual chair looks light and speedy. Posted on Flickr by ultraclay!

Things that crack me up #38

Which is more disturbing? That the disabled wheelchair symbol guy is naked or that the nondisabled stick figure guy is not wearing pants?
















Image description: A color photo of restroom signage in the Honolulu, Hawaii, airport, posted on Flickr by Wha'ppen. On a black or dark brown background two white stick figures for the mens' restroom: The universal access wheelchair guy, looking like he always does in simple white outline, sits next to the mostly universal stick figure symbol for the mens' restroom -- a nondisabled standing guy in simple white outline. Except the nondisabled guy is wearing a very festive Hawaiian shirt , yellow with red flowers. The effect of the colorful shirt on the otherwise white figure is that he appears to be wearing only a shirt. Disabled guy doesn't get a shirt.

Culture, chaos theory and choice

So, in my BADD post the other day, I explicitly noted the evil of our U.S. foreign policy in Iraq -- our war that, among other things, disables Iraqi children, many of whom will live their lives in a society with such a damaged infrastructure that their basic needs will never (not for one day) be well met. I know that some people trying to understand disability culture and the idea of impairments as not inherently tragic will be further confused by this. (No, being disabled is not a tragedy, yes, being disabled by an occupying army is an outrage and tragedy.)

The current discussion in comments at Alas, A Blog, started by WheelchairDancer's wonderful post "On Making Argument: Disability and Language" (also with a separate comment trajectory at her personal blog) struggles with this, or with several readers' inability to mesh together the ideas that while being or becoming disabled is not a choice, it is experienced by many people as normal or even filled with various human joys.

The confusion persists, I think, because disability is seen as this separate thing that happens, not as part of the whole spectrum of possible valid and ordinary life experiences. Maybe the breadth of what disability includes causes part of the confusion: we are the person born with spina bifida and the old fart losing his hearing, we are the person born to quadriplegia in a car crash and the cancer survivor who lost a limb while winning the battle, we're the child born with Down Syndrome and the dyslexic movie star, we're the institutionalized schizophrenic and the woman taking anti-depressants to keep moving through her busy day.

Pitting one life experience against another is ludicrous and unfair, of course, but in those comparisons I just made, the first examples are routinely seen as tragic and the second ones are all sometimes -- for better or worse -- seen as either common and ordinary or as triumphs of luck, strength and will. Neither characterization sums up the individual life or experience with disability. With adequate and just support, any disabled individual might lead an utterly ordinary life where his impairments are only one aspect of who he is. Or it might be the very thing that completely defines him. It might inspire him to amazing heights or leave him paralyzed with bitterness. (Yeah, note the metaphor there. Discuss, again, if you like.) People are different like that.

Two people can have the same job, with one hating it miserably and the other blithely content. Neighbors living side-by-side for sixty years can lead incredibly different lives. All life, but maybe especially disability, is chaos theory in action. Any outcome might be true.

The thing that makes the war in Iraq and the children it disables an outrage and tragedy is the degree of human choice. Someone somewhere (or many someones) makes a decision, and it leads to this event causing pain to other people. To value freedom and the individual means to value and support choice wherever possible and to be against human actions that limit freedom and choice of others. I don't find that contradictory to also embracing the disability experience as one that is in many ways fulfilling for many of us, even though few of us got here by choice and some of us have been injured at the hands of others.

The Most Important Disability Policy

I had a hard time choosing one topic for this year's BADD. There's the presidential candidates' disability policies, McCain's refusal to even listen to the concerns of disabled Americans worried about institutionalization, funding cutbacks sure to threaten the mobility and health of disabled Americans (and all Americans) even more in the future.

A judge in Kentucky recently found a man named Ohmer Portwood guilty of breaking the pedestrian code for driving his wheelchair in the road, even though Portwood reportedly has nowhere else to be because of a lack of safe and accessible sidewalks. The judge declared that the city of Lancaster's failure to comply with the ADA was a separate issue.

Pharmaceutical companies lie for profit, children are given shock therapy, returning military vets are discharged without adequate health care.

And yet, the greatest example of disablism at work in the world today is this immoral war in Iraq that terrifies, maims, and kills while also destroying the existing social structure of supports that could help manage the everyday needs of Iraqi citizens. Maybe it sounds like a stretch to call civilian war casualties disablism in action, but what is disableist policy if not a policy that holds the lives, bodies and minds of others so cheaply?

What follows are 20 photos, mostly of Iraqi children.* Some are very hard to look at -- consider this a trigger warning. I've added my usual image descriptions for accessibility for all but they are limited to descriptions of what I see and lack specifics of time and place. Feel free to comment if you see something different in the images.











Image description: A young girl -- no more than three-years-old -- is in the foreground being carried by an adult. In the background, behind other people, are black trails of clouds from something burning. The girl is frightened and crying.












Image description: Under a sky blackened by sooty clouds, a tank follows a family that flees. A man and three children all hold hands as they move toward the camera. The background appears to be all desert. They carry nothing with them.











Image description: A close-up of a young girl facing the camera, her eyes brimming and wet with tears. In the background a military tank comes down the street.












Image description: A boy and girl, both perhaps age five, stand before a man in full military gear who runs a metal-detecting wand in front of the girl's chest. She stands with arms outstretched so the man can sweep her for explosives.













Image description: In the foreground, the torso of a man standing in full military gear and carrying a machine gun. In the background a child, perhaps four-years-old, sits, with both hands raised to cover her face.
















Image description: A young girl (maybe six?) sits cross-legged, arms wrapped to hug herself and cries, open-mouthed. A cinder block wall next to her is spattered with blood and just in front of her an adult lies in the grass, with only his feet and calves visible in the photo.
















Image description: A girl, maybe eight-years-old, sits cross-legged on a cushion, crying in anguish (and perhaps, pain) as she faces the camera. Her face and neck are spattered with blood, and the front of her pink shirt is wet with blood, as well.












Image description: A bearded man sits on a bed's bare mattress wearing only an undershirt and shorts. His feet are bare and dirty. He cradles a small child in his arms. The child appears to be unconscious and wears only an olive t-shirt and a white bandage over the top half of his head, with blood soaking through at the top.











Image description: A toddler lies on his back on a bed, his right arm covered in heavy white bandages and his shirt pulled up to reveal another bandage on his chest. He is crying.












Image description: A pretty girl (maybe eight?) lies on her side looking solemnly to the camera. The hand of her arm that lies along the pillow before her face is heavily bandaged.
















Image description: A girl, perhaps ten-years-old, lies stretched on a gurney. One hand is bandaged and the other holds a child's drawing. Her bare legs show serious, deep wounds, with about half of both her right knee and left ankle missing as if very large bites of flesh were taken from each.
















Image description: A child of three or four lies sleeping on her side, face nestled against the hip of an adult. Her left knee and foot are lightly bandaged, and the right leg is heavily bandaged from the top down to where it ends above the ankle.












Image description: A young boy lies, half-unconscious, with a bandage over his nose possibly holding a naso-gastric tube in place. His entire torso is covered in heavy bandages. In the background a woman sits keeping vigil.











Image description: A boy lays on a bare mattress, on his stomach but resting his upper body on his elbows. The white clothes he wears are all stained with blood, as are his hair, face and legs. He stares pensively off-camera.
















Image description: A man in Arab dress carries an unconscious girl past a jumble of bodies in the background. The girl's clothes are torn and a grotesque jumble of flesh and bone hangs where her right foot should be.
















Image description: A man carries a girl in a school uniform across a courtyard. She is crying and blood runs across her face, down her bare legs and across her sandals.











Image description: A close-up of a girl's face as she stares blankly toward the camera. While her eyes appear undamaged, the skin of her forehead, nose and cheeks is badly damaged, perhaps burned.
















Image description: Two women, one in a white medical coat and the other an older woman in Arab dress, stand over a toddler laying on a table crying. Heavy bandages cover the child's torso and crotch. The child's left leg is entirely missing.











Image description: A boy lies in a bed on his back. His heavily-bandaged left forearm is raised to rest across his forehead. His right arm ends a few inches below the elbow with the bare stump in the foreground. His torso is a mass of stitches and bandages, with a chest tube adhering to his right abdomen.












Image description: A boy lies in bed on a colorful blanket, conscious and trying hard not to cry as a hand wipes his cheek. A bandage is wrapped around his forehead. Both of his arms are almost completely missing, with the stumps in white bandages. His chest and abdomen are covered in what seems like a white paste, though the black burned skin is clearly visible beneath the salve.


*Given that these photos were mined from the internet, it's certainly possible they are not all of children in Iraq under the current occupation. But I found them on sites that presented them as such, and they are, if nothing else, all photos of children living under violent circumstances, many in the clear presence of military occupation that leads to their great injury and harm. My BADD post is late because I was trying to find mainstream media news sources for these photos that might include photo credit and caption info. That's proven difficult but I'll happily accept any info on any of these photos' origins that anyone might have.While these photos were at various sites, they were also grouped together at a site called Children of Iraq, where dozens of similar ones can be seen.