PhilosopherCrip

So, my netbook decided to start hating the hotel wireless in Atlanta and I never had the time or inclination to buy the wireless service when I moved on to DC, so here I am back in MI wanting to say something at least about the final 2 days of the Atlanta ADAPT action!

Tuesday was, by far, the most intense of the 3 days of direct action.  We assembled in the ballroom, as it was still raining, before venturing forth to the Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights regional headquarters.

Our aim was to start an authentic conversation about enforcing the Olmstead supreme court decision in Georgia and the surrounding south eastern region.  Complying with this ADA case law would mean providing long term care services to people with disabilities in the least restrictive setting, namely, not an institution.  The case was decided a decade ago, in 1999, but there are not mechanisms in place for the government to hold itself accountable to the ruling.  ADAPT showed up in force to raise this issue in a way that a few local “advocates” cannot do on their own with polite phone calls and letters.  This is not to diminish the efforts of those in Atlanta working every day to free our people.  However, there comes a time when power is so unbalanced that direct action is the only way to create the tension necessary to force dialogue.  This is where non-violence steps in.  It was many of those phone callers and letter writers who asked ADAPT to come to Atlanta to seek the justice promised by Olmstead and many of them were with us the entire way.  Georgia seems very fired up and ready to push back.  We are all ADAPT.

Non-violence up against the security barricade in the very crowded lobby of HHS OCR

So, we basically blew past security and forced our way into HHS OCR.  A few hundred of us made it inside, and I was one of those who made it through the door but not past the security barricade.  A few hundred more ADAPTers were outside, blockading the front entrance and displaying our orange banners, decrying the government’s inaction when it comes to getting folks with disabilities out of the ghettos and warehouses.  Inside, there was quite a bit of chanting and some overzealous security guards (who we later began referring to as “rentacops”) actually turned to violence.  I had seen folks manhandled before at ADAPT actions, especially non-chair users, but the reaction of these guards was not anything anyone expected.  We were loud but peaceful and these guys started picking off and forcefully cuffing anyone who was walking while being loud.  This pissed me off quite a bit because it implies that those the guards perceived as non-disabled must be the leaders.  At one point, a guard told a women I was sitting next to that doesn’t have an obvious physical disability that she was “putting all of these people in danger and there are better ways of doing things.”  I don’t think he expected me to tell him off in a very cool, but assertive way, explaining that I had driven all the way from MI to be there and hadn’t been tricked or even asked by someone without a disability to be there.  I then explained that not only was this my free choice, but I had become convinced that non-violent direct action and civil disobedience were necessary, highly effective negotiation tools after reading Martin Luther King’s book Why We Can’t Wait, documenting the Birmingham anti-segregation sit ins and all of the strategies behind them.  This gaurd was a very large, intimidating black man but I think my explanation about King struck a chord with him.  He more or less shut up the rest of the time and I actually caught him subtly tapping his foot to the beat of our Community Choice Song later.  Some of the other guards were not so willing to talk.  I saw one kid who jumped over the baricade wall knocked to the ground face first and put in a headlock as he was being cuffed.  Did I mention he was an amputee who jumped out of his chair as he went over the wall?  Another young man, without a physical disability that I could see, was actually thrown by an angry guard head first into a marble wall.  No one from ADAPT, that I know of reacted with violence.  We were true to the tradition of fighting for civil rights without physical violence.  It is through a willingness to experience violence without reacting with violence that we will find justice.  Ultimately, the suits at HHS OCR agreed to a meeting the next day that resulted in a promise to put in place mechanisms to enforce Olmstead.  There were some pretty badly bruised ADAPTers, but no one was seriously injured.

After, eating lunch on the HHS OCR patio, ADAPT formed up again and pulled off a SECOND action at the regional headquarters of the office of Housing and Urban Development.  By that time, the police really were starting to understand what ADAPT was in Atlanta to do and that we were not a typical group of mild mannered, smiling cripples.  I, however, was a smiling cripple when we moved out toward the HUD office and a police helicopter began circling over us in anticipation of where we were marching to next!  This made me proud.  It made me feel like those with power were taking notice of us, finally, and showed us some degree of respect, even if it was respect through fear.  HUD was mostly a more mild encounter.  Laura, another MI ADAPTer who was in the first wave that blasted through the door, experienced some violence when a guard at the elevator bank grabbed her chair’s joystick and crashed her, legs first, into a pile of chairs when she refused to move.  She took some bruises that day.  Ultimately, we were successful there too.  We were offered a meeting in a matter of minutes, which resulted in promises to improve the accessibility of low income housing in that region.  This was a meeting that Georgians had been trying to get for, literally, years.

The next day, it was still raining.  ADAPT made its move on CNN’s world headquarters.   I’ve thought a lot about why the media has ignored our issue for decades and am persuaded by Chomsky’s analysis of how the media serves corporate power.  Not that CNN is in bed with the nursing home lobby, but the media’s first priority is to bring in advertising revenue and long term care is not an issue that will keep the folks with the buying power tuned in.  White picket fence suburbia wants to know about the swine flu and balloon boy and so that is what is aired to maximize profits.  Soccer moms and 6 pack dads can’t always relate quickly and easily to the community based long term care issue (although they could definitely get it if it was presented in the right way).  It is confusing and often seen as something that only affects a small, stigmatized group (of course, this isn’t true as nearly everyone will aquire a disability from aging and require long term care eventually).  Anyway, we got the attention of CNN and generated some interest in a follow up segment to try and make up for a mistake made by CNN’s medical guru Sanjay Gupta, who mistakenly explained that the community choice act had something to do with making hospitals more wheelchair accessible.  We will wait and see if the story ever runs.  At the very least, they can no longer claim ignorance of the issue.

This pretty much sums up my summary of the Atlanta action.  I will be writing more about it in the coming weeks, but it will be more relective and less tied to the actual events of the week.