Planet of the Blind

Scared? Me? Kind Of. Its Open Season on the Disabled.

Every day I read something about disability that frightens me out of my wits. I generally have strong wits so this is a serious declaration on my part. There’s the story of Sean Vidal, a North Carolina teen with schizophrenia who was shot to death by police. Or the death of Robert Saylor who had Down Syndrome and died of asphyxiation after being handcuffed and tasered by police. Then there’s the story of Charlie McGillivary, a man with severe brain damage, who couldn’t speak, who was murdered by police in Toronto. More stories of disability murder at the hands of police can be found here. 

 

Then there’s the story of two Maryland teen girls who bullied an autistic boy into performing sexual acts. 

 

“The girls, ages 17 and 15, threatened the teen with a knife, kicked him in the groin and dragged him around by his hair, said St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office Sgt. Cara Grumbels. They coerced him into walking on a partially frozen pond and then refused to help him out of the frigid water, she said.”

 

Or how about this: “Trigger Happy Cop Kills Disabled Man’s Service Dog”

 

Or the story of Kelly Thomas, a homeless man with mental illness, who was beaten into a coma by Fullerton, California police. 

 

These stories are indeed legion. 

 

This is why the Senate’s hearings on disability and law enforcement are critically important. But the issue of disability and law enforcement is more complex than this quote from Senator Durbin would have it:

 

“As local mental health and disability services become increasingly scarce, the burden on police officers to play both law enforcer and social worker will only grow,” Durbin said, adding that Congress and the executive branch need to help local and state law enforcement “develop practices that protect police officers, disabled individuals and the public.”

Notice the de facto assumption that mental health and disability services are scarce and will become ever more scarce according to the Senator. This is what frightens me out of my wits. 

The American people deserve solid mental health services and disability rehabilitation programs. What’s Congress doing instead?

They’re promoting the idea that Social Security Disability programs are largely fraudulent or fighting to prevent the US adoption of the UN Charter on Disability Rights. 

Scared? You bet I’m scared. 

 

 

On Claritin and Fiber and Spring

By Andrea Scarpino

 

When I was in college, I woke one morning with a lump under my eyebrow and the right side of my face swollen. My doctor prescribed Claritin, an allergy medicine. The lump continued to swell and my face continued to swell, and each day I returned to the doctor, I was sent away. Five days later, my eye completely swollen shut and my face too tender to touch, I brought myself to the emergency room. The ophthalmologist on duty immediately started IV antibiotics, lanced and drained the lump, and packed the wound with gauze. A Staph infection was threatening my optic nerve. I missed my brother’s graduation because the ophthalmologist wouldn’t release me to fly until he was sure I wasn’t going to lose my eyesight. 

 

This week, I went to the emergency room with abdominal pain. After blood work, x-rays, and two ultrasounds, the doctor diagnosed a 4 cm cyst on my ovary. And told me to eat more fiber. I’m a vegetarian who eats so many vegetables my food-tracking app once reported my fiber consumption was inhibiting the absorption of important nutrients. I had a follow-up appointment with my regular doctor, who blamed the cyst on, and I’m quoting her, “this crazy spring.” 

 

I know that patients are poor indicators of what’s happening in their bodies. I know that our medical system is completely broken. I know most doctors do the best they can. 

 

But I worry often that American medicine doesn’t take its patients seriously. I worry often that we’re told all sorts of strange things in order to usher us quickly out the office door. I worry often that in the scramble of hourly billing, medical mistakes happen more often than they should. I worry often that doctors are afraid to tell patients when they just don’t know the answers to our questions and so respond with truth claims that are nowhere near the truth. 

 

Three years ago, I spent a week at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where more than one doctor told me we have only a rudimentary understanding of hormones, how they work in the body, how they interact with one another, what constellation of issues they might cause when they’re imbalanced or interacting in unusual ways. And it was terrifying to hear this admission—some of the best doctors in the country saying simple, “I don’t know”—but it was also amazingly refreshing. Just a simple, “I don’t know.” 

 

“Every human being is a colony,” Picasso said. And sometimes that colony functions seamlessly. And sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes the malfunctions are easy to identify and fix. And sometimes they aren’t. But wouldn’t it be refreshing if more doctors simply sat with us in their offices? Simply listened to our bodily complaints. And when they don’t know what’s making us ill, wouldn’t it be refreshing if they simply said, “The body is mostly mystery” –instead of writing quick prescriptions or blaming the weather. Wouldn’t it be refreshing if patients like me who feel brutalized by medicine’s incompetence could regain some of the faith felt by the generation before us? If we could all just agree, “The body is mostly mystery.” And try to work with that. 

 

April 30, Self-Interview

Last night in my dream, the Gods touched my hair. I dreamt of an odd family, people important in my youth. They became tragic with many deaths in the family, alcoholism, relentless sadnesses. My hair parted as I slept and I saw the House of Atreus. And I woke to the long, reverbatory, mystic sadness that comes from the stars. And so I must go into the day with the tempus of the collective unconscious. As Carl Jung would say: “Better wear your good deodorant.”

Note to self: Carl Jung probably didn’t use deodorant. He was Swiss. The Swiss believe they do not stink.

**

Off to the baths. Marat are you coming?

**

“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.” (Carl Jung)

Posted with Blogsy

Self-Interview, April 30, 2014

Last night in my dream, the Gods touched my hair. I dreamt of an odd family, people important in my youth. They became tragic with many deaths in the family, alcoholism, relentless sadnesses. My hair parted as I slept and I saw the House of Atreus. And I woke to the long, reverbatory, mystic sadness that comes from the stars. And so I must go into the day with the tempus of the collective unconscious. As Carl Jung would say: “Better wear your good deodorant.”

Note to self: Carl Jung probably didn’t use deodorant. He was Swiss. The Swiss believe they do not stink.

**

Off to the baths. Marat are you coming?

**

“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.” (Carl Jung)

Posted with Blogsy

Self-Interview, April 30, 2014

Last night in my dream, the Gods touched my hair. I dreamt of an odd family, people important in my youth. They became tragic with many deaths in the family, alcoholism, relentless sadnesses. My hair parted as I slept and I saw the House of Atreus. And I woke to the long, reverbatory, mystic sadness that comes from the stars. And so I must go into the day with the tempus of the collective unconscious. As Carl Jung would say: “Better wear your good deodorant.” 

 

Note to self: Carl Jung probably didn’t use deodorant. He was Swiss. The Swiss believe they do not stink. 

 

**

 

Off to the baths. Marat are you coming? 

 

**

 

“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.” (Carl Jung)

 

Selfie: Late April

Photo: author Stephen Kuusisto mimics Marty Feldman's "Igor" in Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein" 

 

Compulsory hetero-normativity; compulsory able-bodiedness; patriarchy; dominant whiteness. So many oppressions. So many astonishing human arrangements. Note: I’ve left out religious intolerance. My mistake. There. Ipse dixit. 

 

Someone always says “it (prejudice) is produced by an insufficiency of language”—you can count on post-structuralists. 

 

I remain wary of those who “abstract” power. 

 

In general sectarian cosmopolitanism isn’t your friend if you hail from a historically marginalized background. 

 

Still, as Czeslaw Milosz wrote: “mythologies of the unlucky conquer nations”. 

 

Beware your mythologies. 

 

The only compulsory principle is late industrial capitalism. “its property, stupid.” 

 

I will not pretend I reason clearly. 

 

Post-normativity is an aesthetic idea but meantime, the bio-industrial-genetics industry is picking your pocket. 

 

“One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.” (Nietzsche)

 

“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” (Jung)

 

 

 

Ratify the Charter, Share Your Stories, Write to Tom Harkin

 

At Dawn

The birds in my neighborhood, who are beauty in-molded, rise and circle. Their brains are blanked, their brains are dark as minerals. I give thanks and praises there are no Bibles for vireos and phoebes. I’m blind but see light at the tips of wings—gold finches, orioles, bay-breasted warblers.�

Some say beauty will outlast ideas of good and evil.

via www.planet-of-the-blind.com

At Dawn

The birds in my neighborhood, who are beauty in-molded, rise and circle. Their brains are blanked, their brains are dark as minerals. I give thanks and praises there are no Bibles for vireos and phoebes. I’m blind but see light at the tips of wings—gold finches, orioles, bay-breasted warblers. 

 

Some say beauty will outlast ideas of good and evil.

If I am here entire I must push my face into the feathers of the mind. Let others read Revelation. 

If I come back I’ll be nothing more than spindrift to the tips of wings. 

 

 

 

     

 

What all Dogs Know

 

Image: Steve Kuusisto with "Vidal" (a handsome yellow Labrador)--his second dog from Guiding Eyes for the Blind:

 

I don’t want to be a celebrity. I just want to be my dog. Ipse dixit. 

 

When we hug dogs and smell their fur we’re fully realized. Then we drift back into reason and dogs see we’ve gone to a far room. Empathy matters then. Dogs know we’ve entered a fearful place in a crystal palace of abstractions. They touch our knees. They live only in amazement.

   

I don’t know as much about amazement as I should. D.H. Lawrence wrote:

 

They call all experience of the senses mystic, when the experience

is considered. 

So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it 

the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth

and the insistence of the sun. 

 

I understand a dog’s amazement in our company is indeed mystic but only insofar as we consider it. 

 

I walked up the pale green avenue—7th avenue in New York—end of day, my great guide dog working to keep us safe, working us toward the postulate of arrival, the grandest of things, a task accomplished, going where we had to go. 

 

I was grieving for my father who had died only a month before. Grief is impossible to maintain so we engage it in small gasps. I saw my father was on an aerial bridge, high in the fading light, the span without end. My father had nowhere to go. And outside a monolithic computer store I began weeping. And my guide dog stopped, turned, saw me stricken, rose up on her hind legs and gently washed my face. I, who could not reason clearly, was being guided in more than one way. My father’s bridge vanished. I heard his laughter. “Beauty,” says the dog, “is very strong.”

 

We have to let the dogs in. Consider what they know.