Angels
in the Architecture
After
a car accident left me with a chronic ataxia, I was moved from my
public school to Michael Dowling School in Minneapolis. In 1971 it
was for disabled children. I was on the road to recovering the
ability to walk as well as I could, to talk as fast and clearly as
possible. The car accident was early that winter. By the fall, after
much therapy provided by physical therapists at the University of
Minnesota, I remember sloppily chasing a walker. A short decline led
into Dowling and gravity knew my pace. Besides formal PT, my dad
walked with me almost daily that summer.
The
other kids at Dowling, for the most part, did not have the path to
ambulation that I did. I maintain, and have seen, that disability is
natured as much as it is nurtured, most of the time. Some kids, one
of whom I kept in touch with years later, walked with canes or
crutches. They had cerebral palsy that handicapped them minimally.
However, the kid who comes to mind today was laid up in a reclining
wheelchair. From a childhood illness, as the story I was told went,
he developed a very high fever. It was somewhere beyond the low
100s—the point at which a fever becomes fatal. At Dowling I recall
him laying in his chair in my 3rd grade class. He could
not speak and had a green band holding his head in place. One kid was
in a tall wheelchair. He had a condition the obviously stunted his
growth and left his bones very brittle. Those two examples were on
the natured side of disability. Their futures were dependent on the
limitations of their conditions. On the nurtured side was a kid who
had the capacity for ambulation on wooden crutches. His cerebral
palsy, in an independent environment, should have handicapped him
minimally. I think of the people with much more handicapping
cerebral palsy. Later in life I worked as a counselor at Camp
Courage. I saw some of those classmates from Dowling. Some had
changed, other were more handicapped either by nature or by nurture.
Nonetheless, for most of those adult campers the odds were that some
type of medical assistance was in their later years. Some had
developmental disabilities, one was a quadriplegic we had to roll
each night in his bed.
Regardless
of their story, how they walked, what their futures could offer, what
their financial needs now may be, the kids I went to school with in
1971 popped into my mind today. I came home today from dealing with
trying to get medical assistance to supplement medicare coverage. The
GOP is stirring things up and, even if it is in the end more bark
than bite, talk of cuts to these programs is very unnerving. It makes
dealing with insurance even harder when at any moment the rug might
be pulled from under your feet. I come home and look on Facebook and
see the disabled. I see what I imagine some of those kids from 1971
might look like after 46 years. I imagine the programs many of those
classmates could have been destined to need one day to live. They
descended on Mitch McConnell's office in a show of force, of protest
from a group people like the majority leader expect to be quiet. A
mix of anger and upsetting wove through my stomach as I scrolled,
streamed and listened to the requests to save medicaid.
It
is only a bill, shrouded in secrecy. Ironically, it does have the
potential to be as destructive and at least somewhat as deadly as the
Manhattan project. I really do not see it ever becoming the “law of
the land.” I can think of a few reasons why a bill this atrocious
was written. Fear factor: Trump love to scare up suckers to appease
him, to kiss his ass and distort reality with him. Ego: He won't be
out-presidented, least of all by the first black man to hold the
office. After everyone from FDR has tried to revamp the national
health care system, Obama succeeded. Distraction: Trump and his posse
have seen the movie Wag the Dog too much. Notice how every bad
idea out of this WH has, at the very least, the potential of clouding
its predecessor. This one, though, the worst bill in history, is
earmarked to throw some dirt on the growing fire that's implicating
the president and his men in the Russia scandal.
Being
petrified and not seeing were this could very easily go is very hard
to ignore. Life's even more of a bitch when you could die because the
rich wanted their tax cut, apparently the only Americans Trump was
talking to when he pledged to make America great—again. In a very
surprising way we were warned. All those pithy comparisons to Hitler
and Mein Kampf bedtime reading have followed him. The mass
deportations, and yes, I know Obama deported many. However he lacked
the heartlessness of Trump and did not ignore policies designed to
keep families together. And the disabled. . . I just watched the
video clips and my mind went back to to horrors of 1930s Germany. If
all these cuts take effect, see the light of day, it will be as cruel
as democracy gets. In a stretch of time, imagination and politics,
Ryan and McConnell are, at the end of their constituents' time, no
better than Himmler and Mengele. What they propose to do is simple;
deny life-saving assistance to care for disabled populations, to
elderly who may have worked their whole lives, or to the grown
versions of those kids from Dowling.
No comments:
Post a Comment