USDOT Celebrates ADA...

 

 Feeling very like the beat reporter she once may have aspired to be, your Bohemian Crip attended the Department of Transportation webinar/ ADA celebration Tuesday.  At 32, the ADA is now old enough to have a big important job it hates, but is still seen as the country’s first civil rights suggestion, by many.(Not if you attended the webinar, though…if disabled aliens heard this message from space, they would probably sprain a tentacle to get to the America where everyone is ready to welcome the contributions of those with disabilities.  Even I believed, for a hot minute, in between feeling ancient  about all the poised young activists, and even government liaisons who “ have never known a pre- ADA world.”.) I felt like saying  “You’re welcome!1” but I don’t have it like that…what activism teenaged me engaged in was almost as compulsory as other homework and as little remarked on.  My teenaged self would probably be annoyed that I do this now, instead of something with a little sparkle in it.

I suppose I thought there’d be something for the Disability Organizing Team to chew on, but it seemed a bad time to bring anything new into the mix for them right now., but we are making a beginning at consolidating some efforts and team-building without trust exercises; it’s coming along.

I am concerned that governmental efforts to respect wheelchair-using flyers and their equipment will not be fast enough…people have died over that. Still, theDisabled Travellers' Bill Of Rights  seems like a promising beginning.

I am a lot less excited about driverless vehicles than the people at the meeting.  Maybe it will be more of a relief for people with sensory disabilities, maybe not like the mobility disabilities I've got going on.

Something that I had not been aware of about the infrastructure bill I wasn't aware of was a project to invest in modifying transit stations for access. Many people I know have been waiting for this for years; it's past due.

I'm No Jonathan Larsen, but I couldn't resist an attempt...

 (his is better, don't sue me for trying anything...)

187 Minutes

A lot can happen in 187 minutes

How do you measure a coup?

Thousands and thousands of gun-toting hooples,

Have finally shown they’d break shit for you.

Remember the hate…

It makes fascism great,

And if the VP dies,

Oh, well time flies,

You can’t make a great omelette

Without breaking some eggs.

A lot can happen in  187 minutes,

Executive Time can sure as hell turn Prime,

When what leads, really bleeds.

With bear spray, and flagpoles, and lots of illegal weapons,

Back the blue…hey, lib, screw you,

We back them into suicide.

I'm totally sharing this again...

"Neal Washington" has died... 

I wanna Be Your Joyce Davenport 

That actor was pretty much the coolest.  Condolences to his nearest and dearest from a pasty nobody in a desert state tonight.

In more modern news, I might be the shallowest activist alive, because every time "187 minutes" comes up in the hearings, I'm thinking about..."measuring a year" like any would be theater geek of my age and station, instead of having wise thoughts about saving Democracy, but, maybe poetry can help, again.

  sometimes it does...be patient with me, America.

On Reading Banned Books and Other Stories....

 I suppose I could chalk it up to my centrist, bipartisan past, but whenever I read a banned or challenged book, I expect, at some level, to find one that would be too intense for my hypothetical children(hard not just to picture growing up, myself, again...a painful thought in its own right)  To use more of a junior-high framing, sometimes I expect to be totally grossed out, though it hasn't happened lately.

But I  haven't found one in Boy Erased, Garrard Donley'simmensely forgiving memoir

When Ableism Leaves A Mark... Part 1

 

(and no, this isn’t about somebody being a shit to me when  I was ten, either. Getting rejected(actually mostly just ignored) by people you don’t think you’re much like is probably only tragic if it’s your parents)
This isn’t really the post I’d hoped to write, though, about the formation of our Disabilities Issue Team. I mean, I know it would be early for victories already, greedy bitch that your Bohemian Crip tends to be.

I’m learning a lot right now all the same, though it seems to be about hard things.
I kind of expected that having somebody notice an untapped skill of mine(And I’m still optimistic enough to believe that he has) would be a bit more like Buffy using that pencil as a stake that first day rather than…I don’t know, finding a leftover in the freezer…It’s *probably* still good, but it’s not the thing you brought home from the store, just in case. You are going to need to warm that thing up and prepare it.

I went to a lot of fake meetings.(Well, okay, the meetings existed…I didn’t make them up in my head, despite making up a number of whole families and even towns in my creative capacity.) But I was window dressing or a photo op a lot of the time.  Yes, I became, and remain, good at Telling My Story from doing that. Which is clearly a skill I’m employing *right now* and it’s fucking great. But a lot of times, the people I did it for? Didn’t really care that much. They just knew it would look better to invite disabled people and try to listen to us.(The invisible perks I got from being A Cute One Who Speaks Well.  Don’t worry…this ruined me thinking I’m cute about 80% of the time…which is still a step *up* from me about ten years ago…perhaps another post in the series.) Anyway, they took down my thoughts on the mission statement or the blue-ribbon commission and nobody heard again.

The window dressing thing messed with my mind, but the unfortunate thing about this is it made me think “Wow, you know, I’m Good At Meetings.” Maybe, maybe not. It’s only been recently that I’ve been asked to places that might use my suggestions. It’s different when they matter; I’m not sure what to do all the time.

Expectations may be another place where the foul finger of ableism sometimes ends up in all our noses. Sometimes I can not flub a list of phone calls and damn near want a parade, because I Survived. Again.

Sometimes I get haunted by  a small mistake and give myself hell, because the least  I can do is get ‘The thinking parts” right, since there are so *many* areas where my participation is a source of struggle.

But I spend too much time looking for direction(and not just because I feel like the intern, but we have one this year…a very nice guy  named Simon, who, like most mortals, makes calls better when he, you know, gets the lists I *delegate*(which is not special treatment or purposely not doing stuff I can, but being in a team, and stuff.) for him to call with.