What's in a Resource?

"Do you know what you're hoping for?"-- Diana Ross, crossing over

While I am waiting for the overdose of my aging Nsaids to kick in so I can try to lie down without duly landing on the carpet, which I'm vacating shortly, let me post a little more about Liberty. All I ever did there, before I went to Irv's deceased research institute, was take a nursing home resident in a body brace to a luncheon I was directed to organize. That is about it. The woman died shortly thereafter, and the rest of the time, I visited nursing home residents, or subjected minority public housing cripples to the same level of objectification Liberty's coordinators inflicted on me between 99 and 08, aside from the charming psychic warfare going on between Linda and I. The center is always writing grants, empowerment projects, but their staff has little to no enforcement power. At its essence, independent living centers are rehabilitation and mobility medicine at cut rate prices, micro managed by either optimistic or cynical lieutenants like myself. My former peer counselor, Laverne King, was terminated for being a power wheelchair user placed in exactly the same predicament Linda tried to place me: She lied about an onsite visit to a consumer who's residence was inaccessible. She should not have lied, but I am now uncertain about Bob Michael's rather swift termination of her livelihood. The more sentient Erik von Schmettering, the once upon a time dubious ally from whom I sought relief, in much the same way as Celine screamed for relief in his work, would say the CIL I knew in 89 has *changed,* but that isn't really the truth. They just encroached upon state vocational services. Aside from what happened to me, why am I so angry then, why am I still so emotionally vested in the institutional cruelty the paradigm represents? I've already discussed their utter lack of accountability. Indeed, even in my recent conflict with Erik's squat and pudgy attendant, Erik whimpered "Chris didn't do anything to you," even though Chris was doing something, objectifying me down to tits and puss. 

I'm angry because I know they need to be stopped, before they actually do drive a quadriplegic with my potential to suicide. In my story with the center, lies the reflection of hundreds of failures, cripples burned across the country, with morally superior case managers hiding behind the shields of their processes. I am not the only victim, though allowing my over-identification with psychopathology supervisor has its own unique signature. If either Linda, the CSPPPD aunt, or the community advocate, had truly respected me, they would not have played mind games with me. Both of them. They could have spared me a conference, asked me where I wanted to go after I washed out under Richard Baron. I know the eggs in one basket approach leads to ooze and broken cartons, but it isn't as if a 37 year old who was under a misapprehension about teaching could suddenly wait tables, or go into ballet, and as I've written before, the Painted Bride theatrical performer and I didn't mesh. I satirize art therapy with as much irony as AS Byatt, who does do things differently.

None of you want the burden we represent once we lose the shelter of family, in my case, never that healthy to begin with, and yet, we're supposed to grin, bear it, in a happy bauble of subsistence. I truly say, echoing my brutal poppa's drunken reflections on the tragedy of his children, that you should let us die in selective reduction, or at birth. Far less cruel, more merciful than life by statutory regulation, all but meaningless.  I never wanted to live like this. I wanted the same freedom I think you have, on the other side of the glass. I still didn't stay down Saturday evening, true, but what moved the needle was knowledge. It would have been an excessive way to expire.