Occupy Toronto: Disability Pride March

(This was passed my way by the Disability Studies program at Ryerson.  As much as I would love to attend, I am unable to do so, and so I spread the word.  ~Corina)

 

Toronto Disability Pride March

Saturday, October 29   ·  12:00pm - 3:00pm

Nathan Philips Square to Occupy Toronto (St. James park)

Please forward and share far and wide!!!

 

 

PLEASE SHARE/INVITE OTHERS!!!
Join us at the square, and come down to Occupy Toronto if you can! They're making great efforts to be accessible down there.

Why Disability Pride?
Because Rob Ford, or somebody under him, cancelled International Day of Persons with Disabilities Celebrations ...
Because when cuts happen, people with disabilities are often the first to be hit, wheeltrans was almost on the chopping block, and social housing still is.

Because there have been way too many deaths and injuries to people with disabilities in interaction with Toronto Police, and considering the amount of funding they get, there should me some disability training. No one should be dying in police interactions in Toronto! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhhkOMTgq30

It's time we showed Toronto that Torontonians with Disabilities have a voice, and we will not be sold out or discriminated against!

 

Facebook link: http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=150322745067099&notif_t=event_update

 

Isaac Stein, M.Ed

Disability Counsellor

Accessibility Services

St. George Campus

University of Toronto

Loathing Words by Dave Hingsburger

Dave Hingsburger is one of my favourite disability bloggers.  I find that he just has this way this words that says exactly what needs to be said.  This is one of his most recent posts, Loathing Words, which I asked permission for to be reblogged.

Loathing Words!!

Words.

Piles and piles of words.

So many of the things I've been reading recently, about disability, have infuriated me. There are words that appear over and over again. Words that appear benign. Words that appear to be about something BIG, about something GRAND, about something IMPORTANT. Words that assume what I want, as a person with a disability, what we want as people with disabilities. Words crafted by others, that pretend to be about us, about our needs, but are only, really, about the sense they get about being gifted in the presence of what they see to be our deficits. Its is only really a fool that could say, "There but for the grace of God go I," and not understand what it says and what it means. There are words that feel good in the mouth of the privileged but burn in the ears of the dispossessed.

Words like: Empower.

I hate this word. I see it all the time. I've written about it before and I will do again, but for now let me rant. Who the hell wants, ever, to be empowered by another? Who the hell wants to be seen as so weak and so passive that they wait for the benevolent help of one's 'betters' for the 'gift' of power? We can only, of course, empower ourselves. We can only, of course, embrace the power we've always had and begin to use it. We can only, of course, raise ourselves. No one can do these things for us. No one can do these things for another. The word 'empower' - where it bothers me most, is when I see it used by those within systems. Systems that have routinely disempowered, routinely disengaged, routinely disregarded those with disabilities. Those they SAY they SERVE. It's a word used without irony, which is, itself, ironic. They first rob of power and then give tiny pieces of it back and call it 'empowerment'. It's like a thief stealing from someone a dollar and then giving a quarter back in an effort to 're-enrich' the victim. Right.

Empower.

I call Bullshit.

Words like: Tolerance

I do not wish to be tolerated. I do not wish to be the 'one' tolerated by the 'many'. I do not wish anyone making the supreme effort to tolerate the mere fact of my presence. I do not wish to be the fart in the elevator that everyone pretends is not there. Existing with the understanding and tolerance of another, existing with the gift of someone's making an exception, someone's making an effort ... as if my existence here, in this place, is not a right but a privilege granted by another. Those who tolerate get to tut tut the tolerated. Those who tolerate get to roll their eyes and glance conspiratorially at the other tolerators at the antics of the tolerated. Those who tolerate get to determine what is acceptable and what is 'just to much my dear'.

Tolerance.

I call Bullshit.

Words like: Kindness

Let me dissuade you of an idea. I do not want your kindness because I do not wish your pity. And let's be honest, kindness most often grows as a weed around the wellspring of pity. Grabbing a door for a pregnant woman who is struggling with parcels to get in is not KINDNESS, for God's sake, it's CIVILITY. We have become a society who wants kindness credited to their humanity card for simple acts of civility. While I do not wish kindness, certainly not more or less kindness than offered to any other, I do wish for civility. I do wish for behaviour that considers me as a person and my needs in the moment. Just as I wish to consider the needs of you as a person and your needs in the moment. Civility is not kindness. Civility is increasingly rare but that does not make it's occurrence exceptional or it's practitioner kind.

Kindness.

I call Bullshit.

Words like: Blindness

Saying to someone with a disability that 'I just can't see disability' or 'when I see you I don't see your disability' or 'I only see abilities', and this is the worst of course, 'I'm just blind to disability.' Oh, freaking, please. PLEASE. No one is 'blind' to my disability and furthermore I DON'T WANT YOU TO BE BECAUSE I'M NOT ASHAMED OF IT. I don't see how you think I should be flattered or, God Forbid, think you are magnificent, because you don't see what is plainly there. I am disabled. Get that. I am freaking disabled. I am in a freaking, fracking, wheelchair. See it? It's the thing under my fat ass!! Don't try to get me to 'play pretend' that my disability doesn't exist to you or to the world. Don't get me to give in to your desire to play 'dress up reality' and feel that you have RAISED ME OUT OF DISABILITY AND INTO EQUALITY. No, don't. Just don't. I am disabled. I don't like the idea of being verbally euthanized by words like 'challenged' or 'special' or 'exceptional'. I don't like being taken out of language and I don't like being taken out of my wheelchair and into fantasy-land. I live here, in reality, and I FREAKING LIKE IT HERE. I do not wish to move into your world where you pretend I don't have a disability and I pretend that you are a saint.

'Blindness.'

I call, double Bullshit.

Hey, here's a word I'd like to hear a little more often: Respect.

Why don't we try that for a little while? Why don't we empower ourselves though kindness and tolerance towards a disability blindness so that we can ... oh, sorry the word respect doesn't fit in that sentence. Respect Difference. Respect Diversity. Respect Disability. Respect engenders respect. None of the other words have that capacity. None of the other words have within it a deep need for mutual change. None of the other words call us out into real interaction and real comradeship in the real world. Respect knocks at the door of social change. I'm guessing that's why kindness, and tolerance, and 'blindness' and empowerment never answer.

Words.

I love some.

I fear others.

I loathe these. 

Why "Retard" is a Hate Crime

It doesn't happen often, but every once in a while I get confronted with a very ugly word.

"Retard"

It's used a slang, as an insult.  People know that it's offensive, but they still use it.  They seem to think "oh, it's slang, it's just a word, it doesn't matter."  But you see, it does matter.   Just because there isn't a person with intellectual disabilities there, or apparent, doesn't mean it doesn't matter. Because connotations matter.  The thought behind the word, it matters.  

Let me show you how.

The noun "retard" comes from "mental retardation".  Despite some popular belief, it is actually still used as a diagnosis for people with a low IQ score and two or more adaptive behaviours.  According to the ICD-10 and the DSM-IV-TR, there are even varying degrees of it.  It is considered to be an intellectual disability, and in fact, most advocates prefer the term intellectual disability rather than "mental retardation". 

Why?  Because of how the term "retard" is used.  It is used not just towards people with intellectual disabilities, it is also used against any disabled person.  It gets flung at children in the schoolyard.  It gets tossed around as an insult by adults.  It has been used to mock, ridicule and insult, not only non-disabled individuals, but disabled people specifically by the simple act of using a diagnosis as slang. 

When you use the term "retard", you are specifically taking defining aspects of people, in this case disability, and mocking them.  It's kind of like taking a person's skin colour or sexual orientation and using that as an insult.  We don't use the words "nigger" or "faggot" anymore?  We know better, or at least, we should know better, because there is a history of discrimination against the groups that it refers.  In our supposedly more progressive society, it is no longer acceptable to use those words. 

The same is with "retard", but it seems like the same regard is not applied to disabled people.  It's discrimination.  It says that you can target disabled people, mock and insult them, and get away with it because you can. 

When you can hurt them in your head and with your words, what's to stop you from hurting them psychically?  Because believe me, you're already hurting people mentally and emotionally with your words, and it doesn't take much for those types of attitudes to shift from being merely words to physical violence. 

It already happens.

Right now.

Go on, look up "disabled victim", "disabled crime", "disabled violence", or "disabled murder".  It is said that disabled people have at least two to five, possibly up to ten times, the risk of violence than non-disabled (Sobsey 35).

Disabled people have been beaten, robbed, sexually and physically assaulted, and murdered because of how people think of them.  Because people think it's okay to use us as an insult, to mock us and degrade us, then it's okay to take things one step further and target us specifically for crimes, not just the individual, but the entire group. 

Do you know what it's called when an offence is motivated by a person's membership with a group? 

Hate crime

The question is, do you really mean it?  Do you really want to potentially endanger people with the carelessness of your words? 

Understand that ignorance as an excuse only goes so far, and intent does not mean that you are exempt from the consequences.  Once you know about the potential results, you got to ask yourself how you would feel if someone mocked you for being right- or left-handed.  Or being beaten because of your ethnic background?  Or murdered for speaking another language?  And then the people did that to you just walks away without facing any consequences, legal or otherwise?

Don't like it?

Yeah, neither do we.





Works Cited

Sobsey, Dick. Violence and Abuse in the Lives of People with Disabilities: the End of Silent Acceptance?. Baltimore: P.H. Brooks Pub. Co., 1994. Print.

The Beginnings of Autistics Speaking Day

Hi all!!  I wanted to let you know that I wrote a post on the beginnings of Autistics Speaking Day for the Thinking Person's Guide to Autism, and it just went up today. 

So go ahead and check it out!

~Corina

Self Definitions of Recovery

Recently, I took a class called "Mad People's History" at Ryerson University.  It's a course that explores the narratives of psychiatric survivors, on their stories of their experiences in institutions and outside institutions.  Some of the stories we looked at were those of the leaders in the Survivor movement from the 1970s to today, and how they affect how mental health services are operated now.

As part of our assignments, we had to go out and explore our local "mad" community, keeping a diary as we went to record our observations.  One of the things that I noticed was how mental health organizations used the term "recovery".

Instead of enforcing an externally conceived notion of recovery, it is the clients themselves who defines their goals and terms for recovery.  This returns power to the patient and gives them control over the services and supports involved with their lives. This also rejects the notion that recovery is the same for every person.

What I think is that the concept of recovery is different when applied to different diagnosis. Just like there are different causes to disabilities and disorders, there are different reactions and progression after the onset of disability.  This applies to all kinds of disorder, disabilities and what is considered to be mental illness.

In some cases, the term recovery is apt; it describes the process of regaining, restoring and healing from injury, trauma and disease.  These are the times when the disability is temporary and possibly easy to repair without long term effect.  Such cases may be rare, since even as temporary, the experience can have a lasting effect on a person mentally.

Most of the time, recovery and healing can only be partial, compared to skills and abilities before the disabling event.  These can range from barely noticeable differences to huge developments for a person, and can be the result of a large variety of rehabilitation therapies.  The focus with the use of recovery in this setting is to give the person choice in what therapies to pursue and whether or not they want to undergo treatment, under the person's definition of recovery.  

However, there are also permanent disabilities that the term recovery is completely inappropriate. These are the cases where disability happens early on, either through genetics or other forms of causations, and affects development of skills from the get-go. I'm including Autism, ADHD, and Learning Disabilities, whereas skills and abilities have not been taken away, but rather develops to a different outcome at an individual rate.  In such cases, there is nothing to recover, since those skills and abilities might never have been there in the first place. 

It is not a matter of recovery, and so using the term recovery is completely inappropriate.  A more appropriate term is development.  A diagnosed child with these disabilities is going to develop skills at their own rate, but there is also more conscious involvement of parents, teachers, caregivers and professionals in observing and encouraging the development progress.   At the same time, it is difficult to give an accurate prognosis of a child, since there is little to compare a child to other than other children, which is not an appropriate gauge.  Since each child develops at their own rate, it is more accurate to compare a child's progress by the skills that have been developed so far, and try to use that as, at best, an educated guess at the rate the child will develop.

In any case, since a person with developmental and early-occuring disabilities will be following a more unique and individualized development growth.  As a person progresses, they will be building completely new skills, instead of regaining old skills.  Unlike situations where a disabled person may be actively compensate for impairments, the term recovery is completely inappropriate.  While the use of recovery may empower individuals, it can also de-power individuals.

To use the term recovery in such case is to perputrate the myth that there is or was a "normal" individual that can fixed or cured to the state where a person is no longer disabled.  This is a very medical model of disability, which places the burden of impairment and disability on the individual in a manner that is very victim-blaming.  In fact, in the medical model of disability, a disabled person is more or less a victim, whether by accident, the actions of other individuals, or the genes one inherited from parents.  It is then the responsibility of the individual to take up the burden of disability, and make oneself as less-disabled as possible.  This leads back to the idea of cure and recovery.  


If a person is the one defining recovery and is making decisions on how to achieve recovery for skillls and abilities that are capable of reclaiming and compensating, then the use of recovery is appropriate.  But for in the case where a person is progressing with new skills and abilities, then the term recovery is not apppropriate and should be replaced with more suitable terms such as development and growth.  This way a person is empowered by their own accomplishments instead of being improperly compared to unrelated others and potentially being disabled through the medical model.

Response to Review of Social Assistance

In Ontario, the Social Assistance programs are under review.  The Commission involved is in charge of "examining social assistance in Ontario through engagement, research and analysis to provide the government with a concrete action plan to improve the system for the people who need it."

There are comment and response forms for people to reply and contribute, found on the Commission for the Review of Social Assistance in Ontario website.  


Being a recipient of ODSP, I contributed my own comments, as seen below:

When determining social assistance rates, the cost of living needs to be considered.  Depending on location and the fluctuation of the economy, the cost of living changes.  In such cases such as the present, when the cost of living rises, so should the rates in order to ensure that recipients are able to afford necessary items such as food, clothing, rent (which for any higher quality of life is much higher than the amount given for rent with ODSP), as well as be able to pay the bills. 

As a recipient of ODSP, I find it a challenge to find work that makes it worth the deductions from social assistance.  Part of the problem is that it seems that the deductions are taken off with the assumption that any income we make in the previous month will be used for the next month.  I can tell you that it is not.  Often, because ODSP does not adequately cover all the costs of living, recipients who are working use income in the same month that they earn it.  This means that there is no saving for the month ahead, and the deductions actually serve to create a cycle of debt and poverty that is increasingly harder to break.

Also, with the current economy and job market, it is extremely difficult for persons with and without disabilities to get a job that would lead to coming off of social assistance.  The amount paid by most jobs available are not sufficient to take the place of the deductions in a person's social assistance and so there is a constant need to find a better job, leading to an inconsistent history of employment, as well as an increased risk of a person burning out and becoming depression and/or further disabled mentally. 

By the time a person is able to find a decent paying job that does not cost a huge amount of emotional stress and is able to gradually have social assistance withdrawn, the person is in quite a bit of debt due to the cycle created by earning deductions in social assistance. In such a situation, it is near impossible for a person to save for the future, either for needed items for a new job, or items to enhance quality of life, or to put towards miscellaneous costs such as over the counter flu and cold medications as well as other medical costs that are not covered by benefits, or towards retirement in old age.

The Registered Disability Saving Plan is an attempt to allow persons with disabilities to save towards their old age, however, there are some concerns about being able to get accounts registered.  For accounts to be registered, a person must have the Disability Tax Credit, which has a different definition and set of requirements than ODSP.  What is puzzling is the mix of seemingly specific yet vague criteria needed on the applications.  What is needed is a standardized definition of disability so that ODSP recipients applying for the tax credit in order to register their RDSP is able to be approved and thus be granted financial security for the future by saving what they can afford from jobs, especially if they are able to get jobs that just barely gets them off social assistance but not improve their quality of life.

What is also problematic is how education is handled by ODSP.  ODSP is suppose to not deduct earnings if a recipient is taking post-secondary education classes.  However, there are times in which earnings are deducted despite the recipient informing and even providing documentation of their student status.  This is especially the case during the summer months, when there are also classes available for students. 

Between being unable to save for the future, and being unable to save for post-secondary education that may especially prove to lead to higher-paying employment, ODSP often hinders the efforts of recipients to gain adequate employment to no longer require social assistance and be able to improve one's quality of life.  Rather than aiding people, social assistance as it currently operates perpetuates and increases poverty conditions for low-income persons, families and disabled people.

Getting Ready for ASDay 2011!

Whew!! Things have been busy for me this summer!

I'm currently working on an essay on violence and disability for school, an article on functioning labels for AWN, and a piece on self-definitions of recovery for here.  Some of them, just when I think I have all the materials I need to finish them, someone mentions some very good resources that make me rethink some of my points or what to include more information. 

However, I'm also getting ready for Autistics Speaking Day 2011.  It was an overwhelming success last year, with such a small amount of planning and advertisement.  I'm excited to see the results of this year.  I've read some of the responses to ASDay last year, and it's been incredible!! I am still blown away and amazed at people's responses. 

So we're doing it again!!! We're a little bit more organized this year, got our Facebook event up in advance, and Kathryn and I have started an official blog so that we can compile everyone's contributions in one spot.  It's still under some work, but it's up and running!

We're also going to be looking for people to help us out.  Last year, we were a little overwhelmed by the flow of blogs.  Kathryn was incredible being able to keep on track of everything on Facebook, and I had my hands full on Twitter.  We'd like someone who is fairly familiar with social networking sites to help us out.  But more on that later. 


Yay!!!  Our blog is up!!