Focused read in 3-5 minutes
“If You Celebrated the
Health Care Vote Last Week, You Should Probably Thank a Disability
Activist
If you follow the national
media, explains Anita Cameron, activism initiated by people with
disabilities "burst on the scene" on June 22, 2017.
Cameron has been an
organizer for decades and is the director of minority outreach for
Not Dead Yet, a national group that opposes physician-assisted
suicide for people with disabilities. Even so, she knows her work is
new to many of those who tuned into it over the summer. The protest
that activists held at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's
office — a "die-in" aimed at underscoring the heavy costs
of planned Medicaid cuts — marked, if not the beginning of her
cause's national profile, then at least a new level of awareness for
it.
Like the protest held two
weeks later at Sen. Rob Portman's office, where protestors were
infamously separated from their wheelchairs by police, photos and
accounts from the scene took off on social media. Within a matter of
weeks, mostly nameless disabled activists and their fight against
Trumpcare had become recurring, even central characters in the
national health care conversation.
In fact, many of those
activists came from one organization — ADAPT — which has been
active for more than three decades. The invisibility of ADAPT and
similar groups, even in the wider context of social justice
movements, speaks to an ongoing problem for disability advocates.
Their movement is relegated to the shadows and treated as the
distant, unloved second cousin of America's better-known civil rights
movements, but its work has and continues to be responsible for the
rights that millions of Americans take for granted.
"We have been
prepared for this fight for decades," says Amber Smock, an ADAPT
member and the director of advocacy for Chicago's Access Living.
"People with disabilities have been organizing for our lives
since the 1960s, if not before. I think the question is not whether
we were drawn in; I think the new thing is that others are now seeing
us in a way they did not before."
The truth is that
theatrical, high-stakes direct action like that seen in the protests
against McConnell and Portman, has always been central to the
disability rights movement. … “
You can read more here
( ADAPT photo courtesy of ADAPT.org )
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" ... Acosta: This whole notion of they have to learn English before they get to the United States, are we just going to bring in people from Great Britain and Australia?
Miller: I have to say, I am shocked at your statement that you think that only people from Great Britain and Australia would know English. It reveals your cosmopolitan bias to a shocking degree that in your mind — this is an amazing moment. That you think only people from Great Britain or Australia would speak English is so insulting to millions of hardworking immigrants who do speak English from all over the world. Have you honestly never met an immigrant from another country who speaks English outside of Great Britain and Australia?
Acosta: It sounds like you're trying to engineer the racial and ethnic flow of people into this country.
Miller: Jim, that is one of the most outrageous, insulting, ignorant and foolish things you've ever said.
The way Miller leaned into the word "cosmopolitan" while answering Acosta has a long and ignoble history in 20th century authoritarianism, especially the anti-Semitic variety. During World War II, for example, the Soviet government under Stalin used to rail regularly at "rootless cosmopolitanism," especially in the arts. The Nazis were fond of tossing it around, too. There is no context in which Miller's use of the word against Acosta makes sense except as a historical signaling device. ... "
... here )
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