[Ohio-talk] FANTASTIC article about the disability movement in TIME magazine!

Tue Feb 27 23:45:35 UTC 2018

Great! Posted on fb with vote no on HR 620 tacked on. CF

On 2/27/18, Deborah Kendrick via Ohio-Talk <ohio-talk at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>
> Thank you, Suzanne!
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ohio-Talk [mailto:ohio-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Suzanne
> Turner via Ohio-Talk
> Sent: Monday, February 26, 2018 5:01 PM
> To: 'NFB of Ohio Announcement and Discussion List' <ohio-talk at nfbnet.org>;
> NFBOH-Cleveland at nfbnet.org
> Cc: Suzanne Turner <smturner.234 at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Ohio-talk] FANTASTIC article about the disability movement in TIME
> magazine!
>
> Good Article.
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> ST
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> http://time.com/5168472/disability-activism-trump/
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> 'Our Lives Are at Stake.' How Donald Trump Inadvertently Sparked a New
> Disability Rights Movement
>
>
> By  <http://time.com/author/abigail-abrams/> ABIGAIL ABRAMS
>
>
> 11:44 AM EST
>
> One day last March, Kings Floyd’s boss came into work and asked if she’d
> like to get arrested.
>
> At first Floyd, 23, did a double take. Floyd has muscular dystrophy and
> worked at an organization that advocates for people with disabilities, but
> had never been very political. But when she learned about the Republican
> health care bill that would repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act and make
> cuts to Medicaid, she decided to join more than 50 disability-rights
> activists in a protest in the Capitol Rotunda. Brand new to activism at the
> time, Floyd proudly recalls that she was one of the last people left
> chanting as police took protesters out of the rotunda one by one.
>
> “That event changed everything,” she says. “I realized I had a
> responsibility to support my community.” In the year since that first
> protest, Floyd has revived her area chapter of the national
> disability-rights organization ADAPT, gotten arrested several more times for
> demonstrating against various proposed laws and spoken at the Women’s March
> anniversary event in Washington.
>
> Floyd is part of a new wave of activism by disabled Americans who want to
> change the way disability is viewed in the U.S. Responding to federal
> policies they feel are threatening their community on issues from healthcare
> to education to fundamental civil rights, more people with disabilities are
> getting politically involved. Others are trying to build a political
> movement to define disability—roughly one in five Americans has one,
> according to the Census Bureau—as a form of personal identity, much like
> race or sexual orientation.
>
> The push to recognize disability rights is not new, but it’s no coincidence
> that this current of activism surged during the first year of Donald Trump’s
> presidency. “It’s far more intense,” says Anita Cameron, a veteran
> disability activist who has been arrested more than 130 times with ADAPT,
> the grass-roots disability rights network. “We really feel our lives are
> stake.”
>
> During his campaign, Trump promised not to touch entitlement programs. Since
> taking office, however, he and the GOP-controlled Congress have pursued an
> agenda that could have outsized consequences for disabled Americans. Each of
> the GOP’s proposals to repeal the Affordable Care Act included cuts to
> Medicaid, the
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/upshot/gop-health-plan-is-really-a-rollback-of-medicaid.html>
> main health insurer for adults and children with disabilities. Medicaid
> covers services that other insurers typically do not, such as personal care
> assistants and lifts that allow people with disabilities to live in their
> own homes and communities. While the ACA repeal attempts failed, the Trump
> administration has now allowed states to enact work requirements for those
> who receive Medicaid—a policy change that
> <https://rewire.news/article/2018/01/12/despite-republican-claims-medicaid-work-requirements-hurt-people-disabilities/>
> experts say will likely result in many disabled people losing coverage.
>
>
> Affordable Care Act repeal attempts drove activism
>
>
> The backlash from the disabled community was fierce. Activists staged a
> “die-in” at Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell’s office last June,
> while members of ADAPT organized an average of three protests per day across
> 30 states over the summer, according to national organizer Gregg Beratan.
> The demonstrations helped grow the group’s ranks: at least 10 new chapters
> have emerged since Trump took office, according to ADAPT’s Cameron. Larger
> chapters, like the one in Denver where ADAPT started, have seen increases in
> membership and donations. Before the 2016 election, the Denver chapter
> typically raised about $10,000 each year. In 2017 they doubled that sum. The
> American Association of People with Disabilities launched a National
> Disability Voter Registration Week in 2016; last year the number of voter
> registration events rose nearly 400%. An estimated 45,000 people with
> disabilities attended the Women’s March on Washington last year, making that
> day likely the largest gathering of disabled people in American history. For
> those who could not go in person, an online Disability March drew more than
> 3,000 participants.
>
> Since disabled people often don’t have access to transportation and may not
> know others in their area who share their disability, many engage in
> activism through the Internet. Campaigns like #CripTheVote, started in 2016
> by Beratan and activists Alice Wong and Andrew Pulrang, have encouraged
> disabled people to become politically active and sparked conversations about
> topics ranging from opioids and chronic pain to disability and identity
> under Trump.
>
> “I didn’t know disability activism existed until I went on Twitter,” says
> Kayla Smith, a 20-year-old with autism in Winston-Salem, N.C. Smith joined
> Twitter just as the presidential primary season was heating up in 2015. “I
> remember asking why I’d heard about civil rights for African Americans and
> other groups but not for disabilities,” she recalls. Now Smith plans to
> start a disability club at her community college later this year. She
> frequently tweets about disability news, commenting on everything from
> disabled representation in pop culture to the latest Medicaid update.
>
> Others are channeling their energy into running for office. No organization
> currently tracks disabled candidates, but advocates say there are more
> candidates openly discussing their disabilities than in recent cycles, from
> local school board and town council races all the way up to Congressional
> contests. “It’s time for those of us who have disabilities to step out and
> do what we can to assume leadership positions to bring visibility to our
> community,” says Reyma McCoy McDeid, a non-profit executive who is autistic
> and running for a seat in Iowa’s House of Representatives.
>
> One of the most important goals for many disability advocates is getting
> people outside the community to see disability rights as a movement that
> extends beyond existing stigmas to encompass a broader political identity.
> Though the general population often views disabilities as inconveniences to
> be pitied or tolerated, advocates are proud of their disabilities and view
> them as essential to their identities in the way that many view race,
> ethnicity and sexual orientation. Academics point to strong links between
> disability identity and political involvement. When someone attends a
> protest or joins an activist group for the first time, they are likely
> exposed to ideas they hadn’t previously encountered, which can make them see
> their own experience in new ways, says Michelle Nario-Redmond, a psychology
> professor at Hiram College in Ohio who studies disabilities and political
> advocacy.
>
> Floyd and Smith both followed this pattern. Smith’s explorations on social
> media led her to discover her identity, while Floyd wasn’t thinking about
> politics until her boss at the National Council on Independent Living (NCIL)
> invited her to the ADAPT protest. They’re also part of what some call the
> “ADA generation”: young adults who grew up largely after the Americans with
> Disabilities Act established civil rights protections for disabled people in
> 1990. “Up until this point, we have been fortunate in that we haven’t had to
> fight in the trenches like some of our predecessors,” says Anjali
> Forber-Pratt, an expert on disability and identity at Vanderbilt University
> who is also part of this generation. The threat of Trump’s policies, she
> says, is playing an important role in identity development. Research backs
> this up: a study published in the journal
> <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28758773> Rehabilitation Psychology
> last summer found that stigma or discrimination makes people with
> disabilities much more likely to proudly identify with the disability
> community.
>
> That’s what happened for Jordan Sibayan. As a child growing up in Denver,
> Sibayan says he often felt discouraged by his muscular dystrophy. He wanted
> to be “normal.” But when Sibayan attended an ADAPT youth leadership training
> program in 2016, he learned how to effectively plan direct actions and lobby
> lawmakers. And once the Trump administration began proposing legislation he
> saw as an explicit threat to his community he threw himself into disability
> activism. “I felt like this is what I should be doing with my skills and my
> energy and my passion,” says Sibayan, who has now traveled to Boston,
> Washington, D.C., and to GOP Senator Cory Gardner’s Colorado home to protest
> with the group he describes as his family. “I’ve gained a sense of pride and
> self-worth that has taken a long time to develop,” he says.
>
>
> Disability rights groups push for systemic change
>
>
> As more young adults discover their sense of identity, the disability
> community is becoming more aware of how its concerns intersect with those of
> other minority groups. In 2018, this means both listening to people of color
> and LGBT individuals in the disability community, as well pushing for
> broader advocacy networks, such as the Women’s March, to include disability
> issues as part of their agendas. “Now we’re all forced to pay attention to
> what each others’ individual groups have been doing so that we can come
> together and be this coalition,” says Vilissa Thompson, a social worker and
> disability consultant in South Carolina who founded an initiative called
> Ramp Your Voice! to highlight the experiences of black disabled women.
>
> The next step, activists say, is to capitalize on the conversations around
> identity and turn their community’s passion into political clout. One
> obstacle is that politicians have not typically tried to win the disability
> vote in the way they have with black or Latino voters, for example. Voter
> turnout rates among disabled people have remained stubbornly low in recent
> years, according to data collected by Lisa Schur and Douglas Kruse at
> Rutgers University. Even for disabled people who do plan to go to the polls,
> voting can be a challenge: voter ID laws may mean an extra hurdle for those
> who don’t drive, and 60% of polling places reviewed by the
> <https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-18-4> Government Accountability Office in
> 2016 had one or more impediments, such as steep entrance ramps or poorly
> maintained paths into the building, that could prevent a disabled person
> from casting a ballot.
>
> But the potential is there for the disability community to become a powerful
> political constituency. Nearly 57 million Americans have a disability,
> according to the Census Bureau, making the group the country’s largest
> minority. And despite the groundswell of protest against Trump and the GOP
> this year, disabled people do not especially favor one political party.
> Roughly 50% lean Democratic, according to the
> <http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/22/a-political-profile-of-disabled-americans/>
> Pew Research Center, and 42% lean Republican. “That’s one of the hopeful
> things about this,” says Rutgers’ Kruse. “Because people with disabilities
> are not particularly aligned with one party or the other, both parties have
> incentives to get them out to vote.”
>
> So far, Democrats have taken more steps in this area. The party highlighted
> disability rights at its 2016 convention, and in the last year and a half it
> has created a national disability council and hired a staff member to
> oversee disability outreach. “I’m seeing disability policy, disability
> activists and accessibility embraced in new and exciting ways,” says Rebecca
> Cokley, a former Obama Administration official who the liberal Center for
> American Progress hired in September to create the first disability policy
> hub at a mainstream progressive think tank. Before Trump, Republicans had a
> mixed history on disability rights. Politicians like former Sen. Bob Dole
> have led on the issue, and President George H.W. Bush signed the ADA into
> law in 1990. But GOP lawmakers
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/us/despite-doles-wish-gop-rejects-disabilities-treaty.html>
> rejected a United Nations treaty on disability rights in 2012.
>
> Disabled people still want members of both parties to champion their policy
> goals. Many activists have focused on opposing the
> <https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/620> ADA Education
> and Reform Act, a bill sponsored by Republican Rep. Ted Poe that recently
> passed in the House and which disability advocates say would create
> obstacles to enforcing the ADA. Others have gathered bipartisan support for
> the  <https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2472>
> Disability Integration Act, a piece of legislation in committees in the
> House and Senate that aims to prevent institutionalization by requiring
> governments and insurers to cover home- and community-based support
> services.
>
> Activists also want to harness the energy from the last year to establish
> more formal support networks for disabled people to run for office. While
> groups exist to help other minorities launch campaigns, there is no national
> organization that currently recruits or trains disabled candidates.
>
> For McCoy McDeid in Iowa, the lack of a disability-focused program has been
> frustrating. “If there’s something that’s available to every other
> population but one, it sends the message subconsciously that that one
> population is not appropriate for office,” she says. “And that’s obviously
> not true.” Sarah Blahovec at NCIL has spent the past year developing a
> program she hopes will be the country’s first disability-focused candidate
> training operation. If she can secure funding, she says, it will likely
> launch in 2019. Another group, the Disability Action for America PAC,
> started in December 2016 and has raised close to $20,000 to support disabled
> candidates. While it is still working to build up its modest fundraising,
> the PAC is focused on promoting candidates on social media and endorsing
> those who support disability rights in 2018.
>
> Back in Washington, Floyd is looking for her next job in disability
> advocacy. She helps lead regular meetings of the D.C. Metro ADAPT chapter
> and feels excited by progress she’s seen this year. At the same time, she
> knows this is only the beginning. Lawmakers may not be done trying to repeal
> aspects of the ACA or rolling back guidelines on education for students with
> disabilities. Even when activists successfully block one proposed policy,
> there always seems to be another on the horizon. “It’s like whack-a-mole.
> Every time one goes down another one comes back up,” Floyd says. “I think
> you just have to keep playing.”
>
>
>
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-- 
Wishing You All the Best,

Cheryl E. Fields

A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human
life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will
never sit.
--D. Elton Trueblood