with apologies toLangston Hughes for using his title.
A few days ago, my friend(let's call her A.) sent me an e-mail asking me to come up with suggestions for the 20th anniversary ADA celebration. There are a couple of reasons I'm surprised I would get this e-mail. First, I am so not a hostess. I absolutely lack the chromosome or something. It's one of those things, like calligraphy or a light touch on the dance floor, that I admire from afar, but I have little shot at.
Also, A was not impressed with my flair for dark comedy a few years ago, when I suggested that, instead of the standard birthday party, we have a wake to commemorate all the rights we had lost over the years...maybe have someone dress up like Death and sit in the corner. I still think it would have been huge.She didn't think I was funny and wondered when I had gotten so cynical.
I was born with my disability, and use an attendant for most daily-living tasks. Despite this, I went to college and worked hard to get a degree in journalism in the mid-nineties. I finally feel that this wasn't a waste of resources as I do the occasional writing assignment and have time to devote to the exciting world of blogging. But despite being a young adult during an era immediately following "sweeping civil rights legislation", I feel that much of the promise has passed me by. I have always been a woman for high expectations, though, and the kid who never slept on Christmas Eve. Maybe it was wrong to think the doors of America would swing open from a stroke of a pen, but I wanted them to.
And that was, in theory, at least, in better times. If you believe the economists, though, the seeds of the current collapse were already being planted. And, on the home front, where I have long been wheels on the ground, you might say, my state legislature was already starting to treat social services as its emergency cash cookie jar, and I was already becoming tired of thinking of victory as "At least it wasn't worse," so, now as I look at that anniversary now, I wonder how much there is to celebrate.
Access to public accomodations has improved in my lifetime, accessible transportation has been upgraded(admittedly from non-existent to merely inadequate) but probably budget cuts lie in wait to take these gains away. Let's party!(assuming anything could make us feel like that in July in the desert.)
Let's celebrate the merely pro forma job interviews I used to get, before the HR people saw what I looked like, patted me on the head, and asked me how fast I could type.(And even that is better than what I would get if I were a recent grad interviewing now.)
Let's celebrate a legislature calcifying from merely "unresponsive" to "it makes more sense to e-mail a rock".
Unless there is a woman somewhere trying to use her body for something other than birthing white, charter-school attending, wrath-of-God-fearing babies, then you've never seen an entity move so fast. I have one legislator whom I have e-mailed off and on for ten years and I have never gotten the faintest, formiest, response from.If I didn't see him on TV occasionally, I would think he had died years ago and they kept the e-mail open in tribute.
Let's celebrate the double bind that lets disincentives(to get an attendant funded you have to stay poor...if you're not poor you must not need an attendant. There are things like PASS plans now, but I have heard repeatedly that freelance writing type PASS plans do not often(like ever) get approved by the government. keep us from seeking employment while at the same time that same government thinks we cost too much. I'm feeling festive...how about you?
And, now, of course, my degree is twelve years old, and far more experienced and accomplished souls than I are pounding the pavement that I now roll upon. Much as I might want to, I couldn't fault a company for picking one of them, instead of one of me. And it wouldn't exactly be discrimination, even though it wouldn't exactly not be discrimination either. Just the kind of lifelong inequity I thought, when I was young and idealistic and the ADA first passed, I'd have some remedy for. And I don't.
Let's celebrate John McCain's millionth triumphal return to the Congress, where this time he promises not to do anything.Ok, I know I'm not Lawrence O'Donnell, but how does that differ from the last few years(getting Meghan a column doesn't count, sir) I know...I should be kinder...he couldn't suck up all the local media attention for those three years he was in a box in Hanoi. Sometimes I think that is like that Simpsons episode where the "real" brave Skinner doesn't make it back to Springfield, and he is replaced by the insecure former delinquent Tanzarian.
Let's celebrate another year hanging on by our collective fingernails.
Somehow that doesn't make me want to whip up the sherbet punch.