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

[d. maria]

Thank you, Mary, for such a view and perspective.  Puts me in my place 
and I appreciate that.  (I don't mean it in a bad way.)  What a woman!  
What a human!  dm

On Jun 12, 2008, at 9:40 AM, 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."
>
>
>
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