Two things:
Jul. 13th, 2011 05:01 pm1) Remember the rant I posted yesterday, about the war vet on the radio saying that if you've lost your legs to amputation, you have no choice but to be miserable? Well, just before bed, I checked my local paper, which I subscribe to via email, and one of the lead stories was about a woman who lost both legs to amputation from diabetes. And she's been fighting with her housing manager to get a ramp installed, so she can leave the house -- for three years.
If this is the woman the vet was talking about (and that seems likely, if it was a recent issue that a caller brought up), I'm even more angry about his comments -- because it's not the loss of her legs that was making her miserable, it was her community saying she didn't matter to the world.
Case study in the Social Model of Disability, boys and girls.
Also, the kicker in the article was that the officials involved saying: "Of course this is an isolated incident, because she's the only one in ten years who filed a complaint with the Federal department."
*sigh*
[Edited to add: Here's the link to the story -- I don't know, though, if you need to have a subscription to the paper to view it. Can you folks read it? After years of fighting, amputee gets ADA-complient home]
Moral: Do not read the newspaper at the end of the day. It puts you to bed in a bad mood.
2) I'm typing up my next entry for my Plato's Nightmare post. It's a story printed in a book, not online. It's in the public domain -- first published in the late 1800's, and the author died in 1931. But it's a new story for me, and I've only just encountered it. So in order to avoid skewing the intent of the teller / culture with my personal biases of the day, I'm reproducing it word-for-word. Typing someone else's words is a lot harder than typing my own.
If this is the woman the vet was talking about (and that seems likely, if it was a recent issue that a caller brought up), I'm even more angry about his comments -- because it's not the loss of her legs that was making her miserable, it was her community saying she didn't matter to the world.
Case study in the Social Model of Disability, boys and girls.
Also, the kicker in the article was that the officials involved saying: "Of course this is an isolated incident, because she's the only one in ten years who filed a complaint with the Federal department."
*sigh*
[Edited to add: Here's the link to the story -- I don't know, though, if you need to have a subscription to the paper to view it. Can you folks read it? After years of fighting, amputee gets ADA-complient home]
Moral: Do not read the newspaper at the end of the day. It puts you to bed in a bad mood.
2) I'm typing up my next entry for my Plato's Nightmare post. It's a story printed in a book, not online. It's in the public domain -- first published in the late 1800's, and the author died in 1931. But it's a new story for me, and I've only just encountered it. So in order to avoid skewing the intent of the teller / culture with my personal biases of the day, I'm reproducing it word-for-word. Typing someone else's words is a lot harder than typing my own.