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What is this?
To seek change, listen to the poorest among us
Published Monday, June 1, 2009
First a small hole, then a slightly bigger foot, then a snap. A friend says “Was that a twig?” I reply “No, I think it was my foot.”
It was my foot. I could not believe I was going to be hopping around on one leg again. I remembered three years ago the broken ankle, the pins, the screws and the computer that took offense when I was carrying it down the steps and decided to toss me off balance and break my leg. As I looked at my foot I remembered the long recovery. As I looked at my husband I could tell he remembered the long recovery.
It is amazing how easy it was to forget how hard it is to get around on one leg. I was hoping when I visited the foot doctor he would tell me it had all been a mistake. He sent me for a cast. No mistake. Nurse Anne was wonderful. If I got your name wrong I am sorry. I just glanced at your name but you made my casting call a better experience. My cast now matches my computer. I have a pink and purple and yellow and blue computer case. My cast and my computer could be twins.
Again, I am reminded that there are people who have disabilities that they live with all of their lives. Mine will last for a short time. I am reminded how hard it is to maneuver in a world where most of us are able bodied. Many stores and communities have made changes but many have not.
I will find out three years later if there have been improvements in the places I have frequented.
Julie Seedorf
A reader recently told me I should consider giving up my driver’s license after I described my trip to Iowa. I then had two feet. I broke my left foot so if I can figure out how to get down my steps and get into my van I could drive. I imagine my reader will really be scared if I could try that. It wouldn’t make any difference. I maybe could make it into the grocery store with my crutches or walker but our store doesn’t have a motorized riding cart so I would not be able to handle groceries. Many larger stores are finally providing motorized carts so the handicapped can ride and shop.
I tried crutches. I have proved what everyone has been saying, I am unbalanced. I have watched many people balance on crutches and they seem to do it very well. When I try it one crutch goes one way and one crutch goes the other way and I end up in between trying not to step on the foot that I am not supposed to step on for six weeks. I finally have to admit that I am as old as I am, it is ok to be unbalanced and that I need the four legs a walker gives me.
The point is that when I broke my ankle three years ago it made me aware of the problems that people with disabilities have accessing public places. It made me aware of the problems people with disabilities have even in their own homes especially if their homes are old and do not have wider doorways or easy access into the home. I became aware, I was concerned and then time moved on and I quit talking about it. We quit talking about things and situations that don’t affect us.
My husband is doing double duty these days helping me access places that are inaccessible because I broke my foot. He too at first had a hard time understanding why the toilet stool lid had to stay up and the seat had to stay down. He, too, had trouble understanding why the chips needed to come down from on top of the refrigerator. Things now have to be a certain way so I can be more independent while my foot is healing.
We all have trouble understanding what we don’t live. I forgot what it is like to hop on one foot and have trouble getting down steps or not being able to shop in a store because I can’t walk. Many people live with those problems and struggle with the daily living every day.
If I have never lived in poverty I truly will not understand what it is to live in poverty. If I have never lived with cancer I cannot understand what those with cancer live with every day. If I have never lost someone I love I can never truly understand the grief.
For things to change we must listen to those that live in poverty, have disabilities, suffer illness and have suffered loss. Too many times changes have or have not been made in the name of those people by people who have not walked the road of the people they are making choices for. That statement might seem confusing but ask those that are affected by well meaning decisions if we have done enough, listened enough to their needs and made the right choices so those in poverty, those with disabilities and those that suffer grief can walk in their own shoes easier.
Wells resident Julie Seedorf’s column appears every Monday. Send e-mail to her at thecolumn@bevcomm.net or visit her blog at www.justalittlefluff.blogspot.com.
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Comments
Posted by nisperos (anonymous) on June 1, 2009 at 10 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Thanks for this editorial! Profound! Sometimes we have to create curb cuts for hearts and minds, not just the body; sometimes attitudes are the real disability. Thinking of the least among us is a good way to help bring about the day when...
"Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain..." Isaiah 40: 4 (Luke 3: 5)
BTW, to those who use handicap parking: we all know it's first come, first serve, but please, if you don't have to use a ramp accessible space (the ones with the extra-large cross-hatch area), and another handicap space is available, please take that one instead of the ramp accessible space. Also, please don't park partially in the cross-hatch area, because if you do (perhaps thinking to prevent a person without a disability parking there) you will make it difficult or impossible for someone who needs to drop a ramp from making use of the adjacent empty handicap parking slot (you've then defeated the purpose of the cross-hatch area). Thank you.
Posted by nisperos (anonymous) on June 1, 2009 at 10:21 p.m. (Suggest removal)
If you use a wheelchair & have a vehicle with a ramp or lift and don't have anyone else along, guess what happens when you return to your vehicle and someone in another handicap slot or an adjacent regular parking slot has been so rude as to park partially in the cross-hatch area?
If you have a vehicle with a ramp or lift and can't find a usable handicap parking spot, you drive in circles searching for an end slot, a slot next to a sidewalk or next to level ground, either that or take 2 slots and hope you don't get ticketed or towed...
I wish houses of worship would realize that handicap spaces usable by those with lift or ramp-equipped vehicles are needed (the largest size of handicap slot; one with an 8 ft. access aisle). For those who don't live with this issue, this will explain to you why ramp equiped vehicles sometimes back-in...
Quoting Peggy Seeger's song "Woman on Wheels" :
"...When it comes to kerbs, when it comes to stairs,
I got my special words, and I don't mean prayers,
When it comes to the shops, to reach the merchandise
Is a major exercise for the woman on wheels...
Well, I need you - but you need me
To tell you 'bout a different view of the world you see..."
Posted by nisperos (anonymous) on June 1, 2009 at 10:26 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Regarding those who are income challenged:
The Poverty Business. Inside U.S. companies' audacious drive to extract more profits from the nation's working poor. By Brian Grow & Keith Epstein, Business Week. May 21, 2007: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/con...
"...Federal Reserve data show that in relative terms, that debt is getting more expensive. In 1989 households earning $30,000 or less a year paid an average annual interest rate on auto loans that was 16.8% higher than what households earning more than $90,000 a year paid. By 2004 the discrepancy had soared to 56.1%. Roughly the same thing happened with mortgage loans: a leap from a 6.4% gap to one of 25.5%. "It's not only that the poor are paying more; the poor are paying a lot more," says Sheila C. Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp..."
Posted by nisperos (anonymous) on June 1, 2009 at 10:29 p.m. (Suggest removal)
From previous link: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/con...
Article goes on to describe how "financing for all" slows upward mobility & can lock folks in perpetual cycle of poverty.
Some practices:
1) "Financing for all" in order to encourage people to live beyond their means.
2) Not posting prices ahead of time.
3) Using proprietary software called Automated Risk Evaluator (ARE) to determine the maximum a person can afford to pay.
4) Going after customers with marginal credit simply because the profit margin is higher since higher interest rates can be charged.
5) Banks and other lending institutions such as Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp coming up with their own versions of payday loans based on 30 day repayment schedules. (But, with an annual interest rate of 120%, they would still be cheaper than payday loans which can carry an annual interest rate of between 300% - almost 600%.)
Posted by nisperos (anonymous) on June 1, 2009 at 10:33 p.m. (Suggest removal)
How subprime US chews up its own. By Ian Bell, [Scotland] Sunday Herald, 8/19/07:
http://www.sundayherald.com/oped/opinion...
"SUBPRIME. [ ] The person who devised the expression, wherever he or she might be - in hiding, perhaps - probably had no such intention while devising ever more arcane mortgage deals for less wealthy Americans. But it captures an attitude that has less to do with money than with classifying humanity...
...How will you feel if it turns out that some arm of your friendly local bank has been farming debt among poor Americans? You should be surprised only as a last resort. Where did the Third World get its debt, do you think, and why is that debt valuable, tradable and, much of the time, coveted?..."
Those with these loans must share blame, but paraphrasing Bell, their fault pales compared to the blame of "prime MBA's and other prime financial players" who've put in jeopardy not just the poor but also our interconnected world .
Posted by nisperos (anonymous) on June 1, 2009 at 10:40 p.m. (Suggest removal)
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." - Dwight D. Eisenhower
"I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing aspiration:
We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love." - Dwight D. Eisenhower
"What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like." - Saint Augustine
"He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" - Micah 6:8
Posted by nisperos (anonymous) on June 1, 2009 at 10:47 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Voting as Damage Control. By Shane Claiborne, Sojourners, 10/30/08 (best read in full at link; excerpts follow): http://www.sojo.net/blog/godspolitics/?p...
" ...One of the ways the Religious Right went wrong was telling folks what to do rather than stirring people to think for themselves...
No candidate or party fully embodies the values of God’s upside-down kingdom. It’s hard enough to find one politician that embodies a consistent ethic of life when it comes to all issues (from abortion to death penalty to war and poverty). Perhaps a good answer when folks ask if you are a Republican or Democrat is: 'On what issue?' I heard one preacher say, 'I’m not a Republican or a Democrat… I am a Christocrat and it is Christ who forms my politics.'
It is not easy to make an imperfect decision. It just doesn’t feel right to say to the state, 'Please kill less'… as it still holds an imperative 'Please kill.' However, ideals can keep us from working for 'better.' We make imperfect decisions all the time. For instance, you may try to avoid the large corporate Home Depot and shop at the local hardware store but then find out that the hardware store owner beats his wife, thus further complicating things. We always need to make informed decisions, though we may not endorse things that are imperfect manifestations of kingdom values.
One way for people of so-called 'privilege' to act in solidarity with the poor and marginalized is to ask folks in poverty who we should vote for. Another experiment for white folks in this election might be asking people of color who have suffered so much historically whether we should vote or who we should vote for — and to honor their struggle by submitting our voices with theirs...
More important than endorsing candidates is urging them to endorse the political manifesto of our commander in chief [meaning God] and to embrace the values of the peculiar, upside-down kingdom that blesses the poor, not just the middle class. Our central allegiance is to God’s kingdom, and we invite everything else in the world to align itself with the norms of that upside-down kingdom. That is what we endorse, and we stand behind everything and everyone that moves us closer to that — the coming of God’s kingdom 'on earth as it is in heaven.' And we get in the way of everything that contradicts and works against God’s kingdom — interrupting injustice with grace...
I wouldn’t want to limit your imagination by pretending there is one faithful answer to this difficult but very important decision."
Posted by crzy_mama2mny (anonymous) on June 2, 2009 at 9:46 p.m. (Suggest removal)
wow, nothing to do?
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