University of Massachusetts Boston - Beacon Yearbook (Boston, MA)

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Disabled Students Center University Of Massachusetts-Boston

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The Disabled Student Center . , fwfa Y' f. -19 75 Y X A514 4 At the Harbor Campus, and the Satellite Center at the Downtown Campus, the Disabled Student Center provides services for over 100 students with a wide range of disabil- ities. These services help to reduce the competitive disad- vantage caused by physical disability in academic work. The Center also serves to increase the awareness of and involve- ment in disabled people's struggle for civil and human rights. The Center and the disabled students at U.Mass prove that any barrier can be overcome with cooperation and understanding. W 'W M I was making my way to U.Mass preparing myself with a bit of Led Zeppelin. Suddenly a message came on the radio, let's take a break from the rock and roll with a reminder that the United Nations has declared 1981 as the International Year of Disabled Persons. If you're an employer, please remember to hire the handicapped. The rock continues, commercial free, on 'BZ FM 107. A poster in the Disabled Student Center at U.Mass declares, we dream the same dreams. We love the same country. Below that was the logo for the International Year. I've never had anything but scorn for most public relations pleas. They either involve selling something so painfully obvious that I grieve for the waste of time, paper, film and money. The United Nation's International Year of Disabled Persons represents both abuses. Sadly, public attitudes toward disability are so primitive that soporific half-truths are used to promote disabled people as human beings. An article published this summer in the Boston Globe entitled The Blind Have a Message. We're very much like you discussed a survey. People polled in this survey rated blindness slightly behind cancer as the most feared human affliction. A sensory impairment and a life threatening disease fell into the same category. Humans have existed for some time with, usually, five quite mediocre senses. Dogs can hear sounds that every human is deaf to. A dog's sense of smell is more acute than human being's. An eagle has better vision than does any person. The lowly honey bee can perceive inflated light frequencies that people are blind to. Owls fly at night. Bats see in the dark with sound as do dolphins and whales. Human senses are third rate in the animal world we dominate so completely. Poor quality biological senses are distinctively human yet we have mass media hammering into our heads that sensory impaired persons, blind or deaf, are the same as everyone else. That's silly, welre all individuals. They're not saying that every human is sensory impaired - though they are. What they're saying, in euphemisms really, is that blind andfor deaf people are human beings. That's good to know. A Broadway play, recently made into a movie, Whose Life is it Anyway?', depicts a motor impaired individual selecting suicide over life in a wheelchair. Time's Richard Schickel in his review of the movie stated, whose life remains true to the highest purpose of the play: to set forth with honesty, passion and wit the arguments for and against euthanasia. How has the human race survived? We haven't the land speed of many animals, we can swim only briefly and we cannot fly at all.