Disabled Activists Seek Freedom

Date Written:  1996-09-01
Publisher:  Resist, USA
Year Published:  1996
Resource Type:  Pamphlet
Cx Number:  CX14071

"I'd rather go to jail than to die in a nursing home".

Abstract: 
ADAPT wants to redirect at least 25% of Medicaid's nursing home funds to national attendant services programs. These funds would provide at-home help with activities of daily living, such as bathing, dressing, and eating.

The disability-rights movement, in its radical form, measures human worth by uniqueness and connection, rather than by productive potential; it favors the empowerment of people over the sanctification of profit. It insists on viewing disability in social contexts: the classroom, the workplace, the community. It values nonconformity.
Many new writers with multiple identities are documenting ways in which these oppressions intersect.

Take, for example, the Behavioral Research Institute (BRI) in Massachusetts, which "treats" children and adolescents with autism, mental retardation, schizophrenia, and other disabilities. These young people endure sensory deprivation, extreme physical force, repeated electric shocks, and long periods of immobilizing restraints all in the name of behavior modification.

Leftist organizers often insist on using euphemistic phrases which effectively erase our identities as in, "This conference welcomes physically challenged participants. If you are differently abled, please indicate any special needs which you may have."
Granted, some people with disabilities use the phrases "physically challenged," "differently abled," and so on. But those of us who are active in the disability rights movement generally reject these terms as an insulting denial of our life experience, and of our hard-won community identity.

ADAPT began in 1983 as American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (or Transportation). Originally, 36 members joined together to demand that a wheel-chair lift be standard on every new city bus. For seven years, ADAPT blocked buses in cities across the United States, sometimes chaining ourselves to them or crawling on board inaccessible buses.

Disability service organizations, both for-profit and not-for-profit, have two primary goals: to perpetuate and enlarge the market for their services, and to control as much of that market as possible.

The role of the "helping" professions in the lives of disabled people raises a number of economic justice issues. These issues include: the contradiction between the enormous amounts spent "serving" people with disabilities, and the widespread unemployment and poverty of disabled people themselves; the disparity between the public dollars spent to increase our dependency; and the relative economic status of disabled people, workers within the helping fields, and professionals within those fields.

Subject Headings

• Disability Rights