Ken Cucinelli Was Once Someone's Child...

and couldn't "stand on his own feet" at all. Somebody cleaned up when he spilled his juice(or failed to...some of that anti-choice craziness back in VA seems to suggest mother issues.) Someone once helped him tie his shoes. Someone taught him the phrase "stand on his own two feet" and someone worse taught him to use it as a weapon against the less-fortunate. As Elizabeth Warren once said "He didn't get here on his own."(Nobody does)

Early on in my disability radicalization, I thought it was a shame that most people forgot how much help they needed as small children, being as how it made the continued existence of  such needs in disabled people to be an unfathomable assault on human dignity, etc. What began as a moment of...whimsy has become a lot more as I've watched our government lose empathy and mistake an overall hardness for strength.
Immigrants founded this country and immigrants keep building it every day.

cleaning out my closet...

Don't really have a shopping problem, but almost understand shopoholics(even ones who aren't as cute as Becky Bloomwood.) Sometimes the easiest way to visualizegetting what I want is to pick an object and ship it here. I've done that too much, recently, but I'm covered unless I go to a fundraising banquet or something super dressy. It would be something if the pink shirt with the flowers I wore in the healthcare video inspires a new passion for healthcare in the next woman that wears it.
Like Traveling Pants, but activist. I can hope.
Don't really understand these men going around telling women how to live online lately. Don't want to, either, they're dicks, of course, what's it to him if we breed? More seriously, aside from certain topics, such as "Why The Wire Rules" and "Why Austerity Sucks", most of the time, instead of a fully=assembled life, I feel like I bought some kit from IKEA and read the instructions wrong.  Over time, I've built something, I guess, but it doesn't look like the picture, and I'm mostly not satisfied with it. so, no, don't have any thoughts about "keeping a woman"

#WeAreBaltimore, research, airports and the clap...

First of all, if you don't understand why an American President saying "No human would want to live there" about an American city is insensitive and racist, I can't help you. Not sure I'd even want to, but I think it's outside my powers anyway. He's not pointing out flaws to be constructive or instructive...he's just not happy without some stupid slap-fight.

Longtime readers know how much of an influence David Simon is for me, both as a writer and a dabbler in the spoken expletive, but you may not know about the time that I tried to find a rich history in my own city that I might one day...help vocalize its underclass(besides me and my own stuff, which, because it's mine, I always discount.) So I go trooping to my public library to find that we were both the foremost place to catch and treat sexually transmitted infections in WWII. It was a leader in air-conditioning research(of all of it, this felt obvious) and it fought FDR tooth and toenail over putting in an airport cause they thought aviation was a fad.(FDR won, cause Phoenix was just starting to get hung up on highways.) In the early 2000s, we had the highest cable-tv penetration in the country.  Maybe we just like TV, maybe it's because it's dead here.

It's not surprising then, that there are no ballads or tone-poems, urban or otherwise, about "my" city, which mostly seems like a place to be from till I want a taco. Whatever will power my art, it seems it won't be the power of place, unless it's the negative power of having to stay somewhere for the forseeable future when you've never been a part of it.

Things That May Be Bigger Posts One Day...

- As a disabled person, it can be difficult to read 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation" but not because it is a dark and twisted send-up of a chick-lit genre that, much as I sincerely enjoy the best it has to offer, can be ripe for parody. The problem for a disabled reader is that the hibernation undertaken by the unnamed main character strikes me as kind of a disgusting version of the way the worst ableists think we live all the time: cut off from the world, with simple needs that someone else pays for and enabled by unscrupulous and flaky doctors. It is still funny, though, but probably more disruptive for me than for an able-bodied reader.It is still strange to me to experience art differently on a disability culture basis, since my family tried to teach me that I was like every other white girl, just one that sits all day or something.

-I think Adam McKay should adapt and direct an adaptation of "Confessions of A Union Buster" and that the older actor from "Veep" with the reading glasses could play the part of the union buster..

Kudos to Bruce Darling from Adapt for the sincere apology after his remarks concerning the treatment of folks at the border and disabled people. In some ways, I think I know what he might have been getting at in two ways; I think many disabled people, myself included, feel that we have a somewhat abridged citizenship, or at least unfair limitations on our "pursuit of happiness". I also think that if the people rounded up had been disabled people and the camps dressed up to have some vocational and training "purpose" the outcry would be much smaller and more ambivalent. America wants a firm hand on disabled people, even as it likes to pretend its collective attitude is all hugs at the Special Olympics.
HOWEVER, it was absolutely wrong to imply that we shouldn't fight on both fronts(and, indeed, there are disabled migrants and we shouldn't lose sight of them)
The whole movement yelled at Bruce yesterday, and he deserved it, but I hope he gets the chance to learn from his mistakes.

In Which Winning Workers Remind Me Of Troubled Kitties....

Session 2 of the" No Shortcuts" sessions began with some technical glitches(guess the phone system wasn't prepared for so many active callers!) and some discussion of why the person with the biggest title, or even the biggest commitmenr to attending organizing meetings, may not be the biggest leader for your union campaign.(Not to slight those people...we will need them all to achieve the super-majorities needed to win in a "high-fear" environment in this country, but in these kind of campaigns the true leaders are the ones people already trust to ask...my mother was this person in many of her employments.)

McElevey outlined the many ways that workers could check for leaders and test for organizational success.  She called them "structure tests" and they begin with comparatively low-risk, private activities such as signing a workplace petition.I had read "No Shortcuts" after seeing Ms. McElevey on television, but that isn't where I remembered this concept from.

.  Honestly, it reminded me of feline behaviorist Jackson Galaxy's concept of a cat's "challenge line" and how they usually feel better from pushing past their comfort zone. 
(Much as with the worker, as the timid cat ventures out from under the bed, the challenge is expanded and repeated--the cute metaphor does break down when one considers that there is not an organized fear campaign of ads and threats to convince Fluffy to hide under the bed and stuff.) It did give me a visual to hang on to during the presentation as "structure" is not a Bohemian crip's favorite  concept, but in this usage, refers to grouping that you don't neccessarily choose, such as a school district or electoral precinct.
Groups such as Progressive Democrats of America or Democratic Socialists which I actively joined, are self-selecting activist groups but we need to work outside the groups to other parts of the community to achieve our biggest goals.

When a Touche is Not A Touche...

Even in the midst of catching up with "Married With Children", (would call it a rewatch, except that I don't really care about canon), I am aware that some of these online confrontations are my "A fat woman came into the shoe store," but I need to tell you this one.
 Somebody made a point about antisemitism with me yesterday, which, although not new...is one of those things that looks different from the inside, I think. Being a Gentile who jokes about hating herself and would follow a whole subculture around all "Like your work!" if that were  in any way not a wacky thing to do (it is...I'm kidding...please don't really do that!),is not being at risk for a synagogue shooter.
.  Even when the people running Israel piss me off a lot, which they do.
But then, this guy thinks he has a clincher with "If they stopped making places accessible, I don't have a disability, but I'd be offended." There is a joke in there somewhere, but basically, I said "get ready to be offended."

But it's not his fault that he doesn't know.  Lack of access is totally covered up with videos like "Wal-Mart Employee Gives Manicure, Makes Day", or "Shop Class Makes Wheelchair" and people go aw...and that's it  for most Americans, until they get hurt or their kid has a disability(and some people never do fully see past their own experience anyway,)

DSA call With Jane McElvey--Author of No Shortcuts

Labor organizer Jane McElevey grew up with workers’ rights being part of a package with a lot of other social movements.Her father was also a union organizer and later a politician who was elected due to his strong union ties. The movements that she herself had started working with seemed like they working with smaller goals and were not as eager to name the capitalist class as a common enemy.

Through this smaller, more Establishment-oriented approach, individuals won some short-term gains, but worker power has become more and more diluted since the early 1970s.  “I think it was a fundamental misunderstanding of power,” McElvey told approximately 100 Democratic Socialist members from most of the 50  states on Saturday.

“We didn’t understand the extent to which, once the ink was dry on our wins, The Right would try to take them back.” This led to the decline of worker power and the rise of neo-fascist activity, including that that helped elect Donald Trump.  

 

Still, she sees many reasons for hope in the teachers’ strikes that happened in many states last year.She specifically referenced the LA teachers’ strike because it had 100% participation across such a large district, and unity is a big key to worker success and getting more power than you might have even dreamed at the outset.   

“The key to unity is not to shy away from divisions and difficult topics, but to get into them and not let them derail our opportunities.” She pointed out that some divisions arise naturally, and some are fed, or even provoked by outside forces.

This call was the first of three training sessions based on material from Jane McElvey’s book “No Shortcuts”