as small as a world and as large as alone

5:29pm June 29, 2014

andreashettle:

girljanitor:

youarenotyou:

mattreadsthings:

fagglet:

historicaltimes:

“Disability activists abandon their wheelchairs and mobility devices and crawl up the 83 stone steps of the U.S. Capital Building demanding the passage of the American with Disability Act, March 12, 1990.”

fucking badass.

I feel like there is a trend where photos of monumental moments in civil and human rights are presented in black and white, which really distracts from the reality that this happened less than 25 years ago.

This is a fucking badass demonstration and to present fighting ableism as something that happened a long long time ago is really just not reality.

^^^^^

Yeah, I think that it presents this in a sort of “we’ve come so far since then” kind of light, when that’s just not true. For example, in 2009 ADAPT protested the lack of long-term care services in the health care reform legislation with a very similar protest/sit-in:

You can go to their website to view “Action Reports” with photos on in-person protests and other events, including very recent ones.

Yeah. There are still SO MANY disability rights battles to be fought. Or, in some cases, fought again and again. For example, the Olmstead court decision upholding the right of people with disabilities to live in their own homes and not be forced to live in institutions was “won” 15 years ago, but there are still so many policies and budget allocation decisions that still essentially force people with disabilities into institutions for financial reasons.  The ADAPT site should have more on that, and you can also google the Olmstead decision.  If I can read the sign right in one of the above pictures, it looks like they referenced Olmstead (appropriately) in the 2009 protest.

Then there are battles like the fight for the U.S. to ratify the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD, sometimes informally called the “Disability Treaty”), which is an important international treaty impacting 1 billion people with disabilities worldwide: you can learn more about this and why the U.S. needs to ratify it at http://disabilitytreaty.org  Unfortunately, people opposed to international treaties have been using misinformation to mislead homeschooling parents and others into very actively fighting AGAINST the CRPD, so this is a battle that still needs a LOT of active support from the disability community and all our many allies.

These are some of the bigger battles.  But then there are also battles left to be won for more complete accessibility to movies in movie theaters: Compare the number of movie listings within 60 miles of your city at http://captionfish.com (which lists captioned showings of movie theaters across the U.S.) to a more complete listing of movies (captioned or uncaptioned) for the same city.  If I want to see Belle with captions, then the nearest showing I could find after hunting is in Charlottes, VA, which is 119 miles from me.  (Until last week, the nearest captioned showing was in Hanover, Md, 24 miles from me, so still not really that accessible to a person who doesn’t drive.)  

After  you’ve made that comparison, next consider that it is much harder for a blind person to find an audio described movie than it is for a deaf person to find a captioned movie.

Then, there are so many web sites that are not really designed for accessibility, and so forth.

And all these are the battles left in the U.S., which was the first country in the world to pass disability rights legislation. This is not to say that we necessarily lead the world in every single specific area of disability rights.  I mean … 147 countries managed to ratify the “Disability Treaty” (CRPD) and we’re still fighting that battle! but we do lead in many of them.  So consider the situation elsewhere.

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