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

[Cindy Pitcairn]

Mary, Thanks so much for posting this. It surely resonates with me!  
I'll probably be forwarding it to some of my friends and family who 
sometimes let their view of my wheelchair, age, and sex obscure their 
view of the person in me.  Cindy



Mary Otten wrote:
> 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." 
>