[Access] Fwd: [Access-l] From today's NY Times

[Mary Otten]

I thought this was worth sharing. Sorry for double posts for those of
you subscribed to more than one list. 

mary


June 12, 2008

Appreciations


A Life of Quality 


By LAWRENCE DOWNES

In "Parting the Waters," his history of the early civil-rights
movement,
Taylor Branch recounts how a teacher of Gandhian resistance, James
Lawson, would tell his students not to curl passively into fetal balls
when segregationists came to beat them up. It only made them more
brutal.

"This was a way to get livers kicked in and backs broken, he said,
recommending that resisters try to maintain eye contact with those
beating them."

I thought of that when I learned of the death of Harriet McBryde
Johnson, who looked at the world with an unflinching, sometimes
withering, gaze. What many saw when they looked at her was a scrawny
woman with a twisted spine who got around with a power wheelchair and
lots of help. What she saw was a world that refused to make room for
the
severely disabled, one that looked at people like her - if it looked at
them at all - with horror, hostility, condescension and pity, a
sentiment she hated.

Ms. Johnson, a lawyer who was 50, died on June 4. She was an eloquent
defender of the rights of the disabled. She came to wide attention
through The New York Times Magazine, in essays she wrote about her
confrontations with the philosopher Peter Singer over his defense of
killing disabled infants at birth. 

Ms. Johnson, an atheist, was unmoved by religious appeals to life's
sanctity. Instead, her rebuttal boiled down to a simple: How dare you?
How dare you decide that certain people with limitations are nonpersons
with no right to exist? How dare you presume to define "quality of
life," for me or anyone else, to set the value of a disabled life lower
than yours, or to conclude that such a life lacks the potential for
happiness and dignity because you cannot imagine how it could?

The disabled certainly suffer. But everyone does, Ms. Johnson argued,
and if the disabled face extra hassles and indignities in life, well,
remedies for those things are all possible, and should be provided.
Instead, the world is run by and for the nondisabled, and those who
don't measure up are infantilized, ignored and stockpiled in
institutions that Ms. Johnson called "the disability gulag." She feared
being sent to it in her later years. 

Ms. Johnson was enraged by injustice, but not susceptible to hatred or
despair. To her, Mr. Singer was a monster, but she realized that the
unenlightened also included many of her own friends, colleagues and
relatives. She decided that "it's not in my heart to deny every single
one of them, categorically, my affection and my love." 

 

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