Sterilized Needles

"You are asking people to admit to illegal activity." a New Mobility regular named Barry, I think.


And that is what a good investigative journalist does, educate. There is an undercurrent in American culture, a belief that in the popular lexicon, we suffer from arrested development, emotionally anchored in high school, even as we perform the most complex surgeries, litigate the most arcane points of law. It is what keeps a network like ABC afloat, and in a simple sense, made Six Feet Under worthy of macabre acclaim. Do we have to mature, sober up, in the face of mortal demise? Accept the paternalism of genetically wiser tribal elders?

Disability culture is not quite as static as Goodall's discovery of chimp tool use, but it comes pretty close. Consumer model attendant care is a highly inefficient system that leads to regressive and sometimes abusive role reversal, and all the activists can do, for more than over 50 years of my lifespan, is say community integration is better, even while matriculation erosion basically amounts to institutional parity. I am suffering just as much with Presby as my landlord as I did as an abandoned child in Home of the Merciful Savior. Charles never addresses this, I suppose due to his disavowal of identity issues. John  weighs back in now and again, but he is one of the very few disabled public figures who is as successfully matriculated as a media professional with paralysis can be without overstating the obvious. But it is when individuals like my former supervisor, who causes so much unnecessary psychic and economic harm when she has the cognitive ability not to engage in such behavior, and individuals like me, who most often get left out.

Hockenberry, like thousands of disabled veterans, was once able-bodied. Those of us born with chronic impairments are the most expendable untouchables.