There is No Gold at the End of “Reading Rainbow”

Upon reading that the seminal 80s children’s show “Reading Rainbow” aired its final episode today, due to a financial inability to renew broadcasting rights, I couldn’t help but think back to a poll that was posted on Facebook the other day. I was so saddened by the figures that I took a screencap:

Granted, I have no idea how many people participated in the poll or how accurate the results really are, but the numbers still alarm me whether there were 50 people surveyed or 5,000. The question, too, is whether the books in the poll were e-books or not.

If so, you might think, “So what? Maybe people just prefer to read books codex-style.” That may be true. Yet, for the past few years small bookstores have been struggling to stay afloat due to the online migration of would-be book buyers.

With hundreds of stories like this becoming more and more common, it seems that the poll’s numbers should be reversed to correspond with the reported increase in online book-buying. I have a different theory, which I see played out every day I’m in class.

As an English major rounding out the final bases of undergraduate life, I’ve had nearly countless classes with English and non-English majors alike. While I can’t say I’m surprised by the number of students who come to class without an encyclopedic knowledge of literature, I am concerned with the marked decline in literacy – and that goes for English majors, too.

I have edited scores of papers of fellow students who express shock that their grammatical and spelling errors weren’t caught by their word processing software. I’ve even heard professors themselves say that grammar and spelling are no longer important now that there is “spell-check.”

Simply put: I think what this poll reflects is the slow death of reading among today’s younger echelons of society. The 32% of people who aren’t interested in buying books online are probably not interested in buying books at all. If you add the 24% who are “slightly interested,” that means that 56% of people polled have little to no interest in buying books online (or off…) and that makes the numbers even more upsetting.

When I started using Facebook in 2006, the site was still restricted to university students and faculty. You couldn’t register for the site without a school e-mail account, and there was a mild press backlash once the site was opened to the general public. Even so, college-age students are “the college crowd of 18-24 year olds (40.8%) which is down from (53.8%) six months ago.” (Consider these numbers:)

1) The 35-54 year old demo is growing fastest, with a 276.4% growth rate in over the approximate 6 months since we last produced this report

2) The 55+ demo is not far behind with a 194.3% growth rate

With these older, theoretically more book-driven generations asserting their demographic presence on Facebook, it will be interesting to see what future polls such as the one above might suggest – or reveal – about the literate audience of Facebook and its shopping habits.

What remains, however, is that people are no longer connected to reading in a way that they once were. Just because people read more things online, it does not mean that they read more, necessarily. For many, a transition has been made from the cost-incurring world of newspapers to the free access to online news sites and blogs, but we haven’t heard the end of this by a longshot.

Newspapers and blogs are not equivalents of books, however, and that is what troubles me the most in the scheme of things. If this poll somehow heralded an uprising of free e-books (apart from what can already be found on wonderful public-domain-driven sites like Project Gutenberg) I’d be happy.

Unfortunately, when paired with the death of programs like “Reading Rainbow,” which I spent some of my youth’s very few tv-watching hours with, I can’t help but wonder what is going to happen to books in the lives of the coming generations. With more children watching television now than ever before, we actually need “Reading Rainbow” more than we did even 26 years ago.

“Reading Rainbow” convinced many children that reading was not “nerdy” or “boring,” but a gateway to worlds they would never experience otherwise. What comes next? In the words of former host LeVar Burton, “You don’t have to take my word for it…”

Factions for Freedom!

As someone who comes from a background that fires on many minority cylinders, I have always found it difficult and silly to straddle a line in which my “allegiances” are defined. My own interests tend to comprise a Venn diagram of sorts, even though what I write about here tends to be slanted toward disability most of the time.

This sense of overlap, however, is how it should be. It irritates me when friends and fellow students relegate themselves to one area and tunnel out anything else that doesn’t seem specifically related. So many people I know always consider things as being a “Black issue” or a “Gay issue” or a “Women’s issue” but the truth is that even though each area does have its own nuances, there is much commonality if we stop and really examine what happens to us.

Acts of discrimination and prejudice occur against all minorities, and usually in many of the same categories. Quick example: just as African Americans were once barred entry into public establishments, so too, were there “ugly laws” in this country that did ostensibly the same thing for visibly disabled people.

This went on through the 1970s, when human rights were supposedly well on their way to being achieved, once and for all! These laws helped to fuel the ADA’s emergence, but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking the ADA has waved pixie dust over the US and magically made it disability-friendly, or even—gasp—accessible.

I become agitated when people refer to periods of time by their respective social group’s ‘victory.’ The Civil Rights Movement and the Womens’ Rights Movement are two that come to me immediately. It becomes too simplistic to draw a bubble around these epochs, to say that before X date, there was no equality, and after Y date, there it was. Are we not still fighting these same battles, anyway? One thing I’ve always found absurd is, for instance, the horror some feminists feel when men want to join their cause. Why bother asking men to take you seriously if you don’t take them seriously?

Cynicism is a boon to no one, no matter how many times one has been tread upon. The fight for equality does not end when legislation is passed, and it astonishes me the number of people who feel that once they get their governmental rights, they have achieved true cohesion with the rest of the world. A law changing does not mean that attitudes of the general public change with it. In fact, laws usually change due to unrelenting pressure from the “opposing” minority faction, rather than the majority suddenly coming to its senses.

Since we can all agree that there are long fights ahead for all of us, regardless of how or why we’re not quite equal, why complicate matters by shutting ourselves off into groups and taking turns with who “gets” their rights next? Why don’t some of these groups, instead of making everything specialized (and ensuring more struggle) join together and figure out what their common grievances are? I guarantee you there are myriad, and isn’t there some cliché about having safety in numbers…?

All things considered, people are humans first, and desiring equality means that the unequal want to have mobility in the same socio-political spheres as everyone else. It’s never about special treatment, simply fair treatment! When the end desires of all minority groups are to be respected, to find work, political clout, love, health and happiness (in whatever order you want to put those things) and to overall have the chance to make their way in the world without someone trying to stomp them down, it seems to me that the question overall becomes one of needing a common humanity, rather than small individual victories that never deliver what they promise.

“Are You A CP?” or, Ways Not to Address Disability

A few weeks ago I was sitting in my favorite quiet space on campus, reading from a rather zaftig anthology, when a girl from one of my classes came up to me and asked a question I wasn’t expecting. She said, “Why do you have those braces on your legs, are you a CP?”

Now, make no mistake. In my day I have fielded infinitely more bizarre and offensive questions from curious onlookers, but there was something forgivably earnest about the way this question was phrased. I blinked for a moment before I responded, “I… have CP, yes…” to which she cheerily replied, “I thought so! I have a little niece that is a CP, too.”

Hmm, yes, I’d heard it right the first time. She said, “A” CP… and moreover, she had no idea that what she had said was out of the ordinary or even offensive. Why not?

For decades, everyone from activists to family members, from friends to policy drafters, and plain ol’ rhetorically-driven curmudgeons like myself have been kvetching about political correctness and where those lines fall when it comes to disability-related speech. No one wants to tie themselves down, or be tied.

Some people just jump the gun and get offended. Others pretend that disability does not apply to them. Still more have a strong preference to be addressed before their disability, such as in this case: “I am a person with CP.”

That sort of thing becomes clunky and stultifying to me, so I generally just say, “Yeah. I have CP.” In a way it’s interesting and the easiest way of going about it, because it clearly states that I have CP; it doesn’t have me.

At the same time though, it’s very difficult for a person with a disability to ever fully “own” their disability, because no matter who it is and what they have, it’s something out of their control that often rains difficulties down upon them.

Sadly, I can no more claim ownership of Cerebral Palsy than I can claim ownership of being a woman, a student, or anything else. These are terms that come with their own weights and parameters, these are niches that we inhabit based usually out of expediency and a need to find where we float in the grand cosmic punchbowl.

Offering up the appropriate medical jargon surrounding our respective disabilities gives us a way to define our otherness, but also a way to define our limits. The curious girl from above was talking about the word “disabled” itself, and how she is offended when the word is used in conjunction with her niece. “I tell her,” she said, “that she’s not disabled, that she can do anything she wants!”

While I applaud her on one level for not making her cousin feel trapped by her challenges, I sensed that there was something more brewing under the surface—perhaps a refusal to come to terms with the legitimate difficulties her niece faces.

Many are distressed by the term “disability” because they think that it’s a social construct invented to make us feel inferior, and it becomes easy to damn The Man for just not Getting It. However, it’s not so reducible.

Anyone who is physically disabled and has had to struggle up a flight of stairs, has been unable to find an accessible toilet when in public, has had parking spaces taken up by those who don’t need them, or has simply logged countless hours in doctors’ offices and on top of operating tables knows that there is more to disability than just a label. There are legitimate limits, there are truly problematic moments, and there are quite real inabilities that we face from time to time.

However, to look through opposite ends of the scope here, being “a” CP or even being “differently abled” doesn’t quite work. There is no sense in hiding it, no sense in being shamed by it in spite of the mental and cultural artifices in place that feed on creating shame through degrading the body. Minority discourse asks us to examine how we’re viewed, but also how we view ourselves.

The trick lies in finding where we decide to allow disability in our lives, and where to tell it to take a hike. To refuse to acknowledge it, or alternately become completely defined by it, however, is neither liberating nor helpful. Only when we can comfortably inhabit our own spaces do we allow others into them to any degree of success, and even if we can’t control how others categorize us, we can assert what we think of ourselves.

Ten phrases I’d rather not hear in 2009

Feel free to supply your own list.

10. – “War on terror” –
I realize that Bush is the greatest perpetrator (perpetuator? If he invents words, so can I) of this gem and that he will be gone, but it’s a serious concern. War and other frightening displays of violence still abound, particularly given the recent horrors of Palestine/Israel. All people everywhere need to learn that you can’t fight terror with terror.

9. – “Clean coal” -
It does not, has not, and will never exist. Those who still believe in it should do a little digging before uttering it again.

8. – “Stop by the financial aid office as soon as possible.” -
Self-explanatory. See also:

7. – “Have you ever considered a loan?”
…

6. – The idea that someone is “folksy.” -
I heard this in conjunction with Palin so many times that I came to despise the word as much as the woman. We get it, it’s a PC way to say that someone is trying to keep it real with the proletariat. Unfortunately, it’s also really annoying.

5. – “Economic recession” -
A girl can dream.

4. – “You’re going to need surgery.” -
I hear this just about every year, so it’s not going to be a shock if I get it again in ‘09. However, a year without a scalpel or a laser passing through my body would be rad.

3. – “When do you graduate?” -
Made even worse by:

2. – “I thought you had graduated by now!” -
You would be amazed by how often I get this one. MAKE IT STOP.

1. – Describing anything as “fierce.” -
I realize that with all of the other contenders on this list, the #1 choice seems a bit banal. However, the fact that I heard that word attached to everything from someone’s outfit to some reportedly hot tunes I didn’t listen to, I’d like to think that 2009 will see this word go the way of the do-do.

For the forgetful:

FIERCE

adjective, fierc⋅er, fierc⋅est.
1. menacingly wild, savage, or hostile: fierce animals; a fierce look.
2. violent in force, intensity, etc.: fierce winds.
3. furiously eager or intense: fierce competition.
4. Informal. extremely bad or severe: a fierce cold.

So Happy 2009 to all of you fierce, recession-laden, non-graduating, no-money-havin’, clean coal-burnin’, hospital-goin’, terror-warrin’ folksy folks.

Handi-capable killers…?

Just when I think that I can’t be surprised by anything, something always comes out of the woodwork that leaves me almost speechless. Almost speechless. Let me first offer a few excerpts:

“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted a conceptual, ergonomic 9mm handgun — designed for people crippled by arthritis, muscular dystrophy, or similar conditions that render them too weak to operate normal handguns — as a Class 1 Medical Device.”

This “device” is, or will be, by prescription only. All right, I’ll pause.

” The proposed Daily Activity Assist Device (as it is called by the FDA) would be symmetrical, ambidextrous, and made largely of stainless steel.”

Daily Activity Assist Device?! You must be joking! People need guns to assist in daily activities? Such as? Ah, I see:

‘”A single shot means it’s clearly for self-defense,” said Carmel. Depending on sales of the single-shot version, he says a multiple-shot version could be possible.”’

Clearly meant for self-defense? Is it? Let’s see:

” For the gun to be fired, two mechanical safeties must be depressed with the fingers on either side of the barrel before the trigger, located on the top and bottom of the gun, is pressed by the thumb.

A three-digit combination lock is set opposite to the loading button to help prevent accidental discharge.”

Let’s imagine for a moment that any one of us is on the verge of being attacked, and that we happen to have a gun on our person at that exact moment. What luck! Deus ex Machina! Now, let’s imagine that we’ve already got mobility problems which inhibit our reaction time. “Oh wait, attacker, please don’t harm me just yet. Let me fiddle around with my three digit combination lock first…”

If I sound like I’m being flippant here, it’s because I question the real motivation behind this device. The cincher of the entire article for me lies in this creatively vague phrasing:

“This allows someone to do something that a normal person can do,” said Clark. “It allows them to overcome some disability to act in a more normal way.”

Yes, how silly of me to forget that shooting others and taking human life is “normal” behavior that the disability community has just been aching to achieve equality in. I know when I struggle to enter buildings and use accessible toilets, I’m also wondering when I’m ever going to get a gun that fits my needs as a disabled pistol-packer! Also note that there is no mention here of self-defense. I don’t think this is coincidental, or accidentally omitted.

Perhaps this just my cynicism and incredulity, but why doesn’t the FDA just attach to it a sticker with a smiley face that says, “Dear Disabled Person Burdening Our Society and Resources: You only get one shot. Make it count.”

Disgusted? You should be.

New levels of the same-old low.

Finding this story felt like an eerie trip back to the realm of P.T. Barnum: a disabled woman put on display at a carnival, only to be removed later because fair-goers felt that her appearance was “too disturbing.” Unfortunately, this is story is contemporary.

Rose Harn was hit by a drunken teenager in a 1986 automobile accident and was subsequently, after she recovered from an 18-month coma, paralyzed. Since then, her husband has taken her around to various fairs on behalf of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) as an example of the horrific aftermath of drunken driving. In August of this year, many fair patrons in Idaho complained that her appearance was “too graphic” and she was subsequently excised from the fairgrounds because the members of MADD were afraid that trouble might start.

As if this in itself doesn’t smack of exploitation (it does not say in this article, nor any others I have read on the matter, that Mrs. Harn herself wanted to become an advocate, or that she wanted to share her experiences with others in this manner) – the lack of support the members of MADD showed in this instance is embarrassing.

Perhaps most unsettling of all is the way this story has been written up in the aftermath. The way Rose Harn was described by Jessie L. Bonner is just as shameful and ruefully antiquated as the entire ordeal. Bonner described Mrs. Harn as follows:

”Rose Harn peers out at the world with one working eye, her arms curled tightly against her shriveled body. A rag under her chin catches her drool.”

This is the type of rhetoric one might expect to read in a gothic novel introducing the work’s grotesque monster: one “working eye,” “shriveled body,” “rag,” “drool”—how many more degrading adjectives can be squeezed into two sentences? I don’t want to know.

I can sense that Bonner was hoping to create a sense of pity and victimization to offset the incredibly outrageous story, but (s)he went about it in entirely the wrong fashion, degrading this woman’s experiences and her very existence even more in the process.

All of this coalesces and congeals uncomfortably, making it all a bit difficult to stomach. Do we still need, in the post-ADA, hyper politically-correct world, to offer even more freak show-esque gestures and rhetoric? What does it mean when the mere sight of someone’s misfortune is the point? What can be said when the questionably ethical display of a disabled woman is supposed to “scare” people into not drinking and driving? What happened to the notion of humans being treated humanely and with dignity? Is that passé already?

What happens when real life becomes hyper-real?

Two days ago, my mother and sister had to run into the fabric store, so I waited in the car. I had been there for about ten minutes or so and it was starting to get pretty hot, so I leaned over to put all the windows down. When I sat back in my seat, I was slightly startled to see a young woman (probably between 18 and 21, though she seemed to have the disposition of someone much younger) standing at my window. I didn’t see her face at first, just her waist and hands. She was holding two small plastic bags, and she thrust them out to me without saying a word. I leaned out to read, and this is what she had:

I was so shocked that I immediately did the first thing that came to mind: I reached into my wallet and handed her ten bucks. I have this problem in other situations; I tend to give money to the first person who asks for it, without thinking of why they asked. Naïve and dangerous behavior, perhaps, but it comes from a belief that people should help others when they can. She signed/whispered “thank you” to me and walked away, tucking the money back into a waist pouch she wore that contained both her earnings and her meager wares. I caught sight of her bright green hearing aides just before she disappeared. I should have talked to her, but I was too stunned.

It was only after she left and was rejected by a family walking out of a nearby store that I started to think about what had just happened. I read over the paper again: “I AM DEAF, SELLING PENS POKER CHIP FOR MY LIVING. PLEASE PAY ANY PRICE YOU WISH.” Immediately two separate but equally horrific possibilities came to mind: One: she really was selling these tiny objects for a living, depending, in essence, on the charity and kindness of strangers. I couldn’t help but think back to the etymology of “handicapped” – which translates exactly to the “cap in hand” style of begging that homeless, non-institutionalized people with disabilities had to resort to for much of the 19th century.

The second, though equally disturbing possbility was that she was being exploited by someone else. This came to mind because she did not get back in a car of her own and drive off. I’d been sitting in the parking lot long enough to notice that she hadn’t walked—which meant that if she hadn’t driven herself up, someone had dropped her off. Who would do that? Why? Was it her idea to sell these items? Did the money go back to her in the end? How much could she really make doing this anyway, selling pens and other garishly, ironically cheery knick-knacks (like keychains made from poker chips and small rubber ducks,) with would-be buyers setting their own prices? This began to upset me so much that I regretted my decision to give her money…

The more I thought about this and stared at the poker chip keychain in my hands, the more I wished I had spoken to her. I wondered what kind of conditions she had to live in, whether she had anyone to support her emotionally, if not financially? In the best-case scenario, why couldn’t she find a job? I understand that the economy is hard on everyone right now, and that the unemployment levels continue to rise. I also know, however, that our community has several institutions that help people with disabilities find jobs. My own experiences with their practices have been shoddy at best (I’ve had to work with one in particular throughout my university career), but it’s still a resource that exists locally.

All this reminds me of a book I’m currently reading by Rosemarie Garland Thomson, entitled Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. There is a section where she mentions the Protestant work ethic, and how it continues to shape the way people with disabilities are treated and perceived in America. If the culture’s predominant feeling is that hard work can overcome all obstacles, where does that leave a person with a disability who may be unable to work? It sets up a grim equation where disability = inability to function economically/morally/socially within society.

I don’t know if this young woman and I will ever cross paths again – but I hope, for the sake of her health and happiness—that we do not. Regardless of her situation, however, there was a moment in which the people she encountered that day had to stop treating her as invisible, and to see the harsh realities that sometimes exist for people with disabilities. By and large, much of the public is not ready to think about and truly interact with these struggles, and if anyone else was as shocked and upset as I am, maybe in some small and sad way, it’s a start…

The Cheery Ableism of the Olympics

While watching the closing ceremonies for the Olympics the other night, there was a segment with a London dance company, ushering in the hand-over from Beijing to London for 2012. You can see bits of it in still photos here.

At first, I was ecstatic as the dance (centering around Londoners waiting for an omnibus) included two would-be bus patrons in wheelchairs. I had a sneaking suspicion that the dancers were not actually disabled, but for the sake of aesthetics, I was willing to give them a pass on the grounds of: “Okay, well, at least you thought to include them at all, so this is good…” but then they had to do something that sliced through the thin veil of respect I had: the female dancer who had been in her chair was pulled out by another dancer, carried around, and then began to dance unassisted, wheelchair abandoned, thus making it painfully clear that she had never, at any time, had a disability.

This sort of, “as long as there’s a happy ending!” mentality has persisted in the media and entertainment industry for so long that it’s absolutely incomprehensible, and it seems to persist into the sports arena as well.

Have we progressed no further in our globally encompassing acts of culture? Such actions are no less offensive than sending a white person out to dance in blackface, then wowing the audience with the happy “SURPRISE!” that the dancer wasn’t actually black. I know that statements like that cause hair to bristle and fingers to seize up in their rush to write “IT IS NOT LIKE THAT AT ALL” back to me, but I ask you this: are the messages not the same at heart?

To parade around in the name of entertainment as something you are not, and to do it in such a way that reminds the audience that they are This Thing and that the minority before them is This Other Thing asserts the same kind of grateful reassurance. It’s all in good fun when it’s not real life, isn’t it? Just laugh it off, it’s just a dance/comedy routine/entertainment. It’s not real, so what are you getting upset about?

What I’m upset about is that all of this was done deliberately, and seemingly in blatant, arrogant disregard for the Paralympic games and the athletes competing therein. This cannot go without mentioning Natalie du Toit, a Paralymic-gold-medal swimmer from South Africa who was able to compete in the regular Olympics, where she finished sixteenth due to some gear malfunctions when her swim cap was caught on a buoy. Rather than people recognizing that such things could have happened to anyone, articles were written with such obnoxious titles as Natalie Swims into Olympic Hearts or South Africa’s du Toit Fulfills a Dream Derailed.

We’ll see how much network press coverage is given to the Paralympic games… but I’m not holding my breath.

“US candidates face up to image problem”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/22/barackobama.johnmccain

This article reminds me of the hullabaloo over the Kennedy vs. Nixon debates even though I wasn’t alive when they took place.

So what if Obama is anxious? So what if McCain’s voice has a slightly higher pitch than one might expect? The media demands too much of politicians from an emotional standpoint. Politicians must be: charismatic, but not phony; smart, but not overstated; strong but not stoic; stoic but not robotic; youthful but not young; optimistic but not idealistic; mature but not old… the list goes on.

Yet, in the age of celebrity-craving image-mongers, maybe these impossible standards need to be shifted a little more. Maybe we need to bring it all back to the truly absurd, because the business of politics is surely not absurd enough. The question I ask again is, “so what?”

Those of you in the US who vote, I ask you this: are you really that obsessed with the minutiae of someone’s facial tics? Is a jumpy eyebrow or a prolonged blink really going to determine the outcome of this election? Is that going to be on your mind when you punch your ticket at the polls?

To me, it’s all another fancy ploy of misdirection: let’s not look at the issues or the policies of the candidates to determine who we want – let’s scrutinize the completely irrelevant aspects of someone’s physicality and use that to determine their worthiness for the presidency.

It’s easy to criticize the way someone looks when they’re in the public eye because form, content and function are expected to overlap in the sphere of the human body, too. In an ideal world, all “good” people would be nice to look at: all “bad” people would be repulsive. That’s the sort of evaluation this article is ultimately hinging itself upon, is it not?

Yet I ask anyone who uses this kind of scrutiny as serious analysis of someone’s credibility to reconsider how they themselves might look if the weight of America and other parts of the world were on their shoulders.

This is not a partisan issue and frankly – I’ll take any signs of humanity that I can get from my politicians. So bring on the sweat and the grinding jaws, McCain and Obama. It’s nice to know that you still breathe like the rest of us.

As I read through the article by Wysocki, I couldn’t help but think of other conversations I’d had in other courses about how the use of the Internet has brought about a decline in the quality of writing from a grammatical standpoint. One is because of the way young people in particular are encouraged to shorten everything into acronyms, but another is because of heavily reliance on spell check, which is often inaccurate. Just as students had been told not to worry about learning to add because they could always have a calculator do the work for them, now they are being taught in school not to worry about spelling or grammar rules because the computer will take care of it for them.

This encourages a kind of mental laziness, and by the time students get to college and realize how destructive these habits have been, and how important it can be to know basic rules and communication skills, they become easily frustrated and lost. Often times, this leaves the instructor of a course to have to go over concepts and mechanical problems that should have ceased to exist before a student ever stepped into a university. That is what’s interesting about this idea of “new media”. I don’t see it as being entirely new as much as it is a twist on a classic–just like most inventions are.

But what’s important to remember is that every new form has an archetype, and if we continue to deemphasize basic components of language and expression, that archetype will be forgotten or discarded. Because even though e-mail is not killing letter-writing (rather, it is simply a new form) this breed of “new media” draws back to other visually-based forms before it, such as graphic creations or even illuminated manuscripts. It’s important to stay on the edge of new developments in expression and communication, but if they invite someone to disregard what came first, it becomes dangerous.