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

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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.

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Disabled Students Center University Of Massachusetts-Boston

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1 'Hia Without technoligical accessories to assist our feeble bodies we humans would have been exterminated long ago. Can the death of a motor impaired person be termed euthanasia? A person could be killed by that bear before the person could even turn to run. Yet grizzlys as a species retreat from human presence - retreat from one of life's most disabled creatures. To be physically weak and feeble is distinctively human. Do we need to be told that people who move around on crutches or in wheelchairs are human too? Do we need to be shown any number of examples of human beings making characteristically human contributions while sitting all their walking lives? What of those people considered substantially less intelligent than most? We imprision most of them. Some, it is true, can do little for themselves as far as we know. Many people who oppose abortion approve aborting a mentally impaired fetus. Frequently a mentally impaired infant, particularly those with Downe's Syndrome, require surgery early on in order to survive. Usually the parents are actually given a choice of life or death over their impaired infants. Most of these infants are not severely disabled, many could live independent lives. Intelligence is distinctively human yet few of us could have carried on a conversation with Newton or Marx. Most of us lead lives that require little or no advanced intelligence. Our discussions are usually tedious, virtually no one has an original thought and most of us indulge in brain impairing drugs. Should we be aborted as fetuses, allowed to die from curable illnesses or be imprisoned our entire lives simply for being less intelligent than some other human beings? Why are we as a society so damned scared of facing the essence of what a person is outside of physical, intellectual or sensory power? In the International Year we will revel in overachieversg much the way we admire anyone who advances in conspicuous ways. We'll wonder aloud how persons missing limbs or eyesight ski or how people using wheelchairs dance. The overachieving supercripple allows us to feel good about disabled people without examining why it is that disabled people irk us so much, make us uncomfortable and afraid. Disabled people are often referred to as heroic as if living with a disability is something uncomprehensible or ususua2. Disabled people put things in perspective, are thought provoking and . . . make us appreciate what we have. No, disabled people are not all specially gifted persons capable of healing the tortured soul or of making the absent mind think. These phrases are all euphemisms for, I'd rather be dead than live like that. How can society have so little regard for those members of its own circle who live life with slightly fewer tools than the average human being who is one of the weakest creatures on earth? Disabled people remind the able bodies of the latter's dependence on life's superficial tools. Disabled people remind the able bodied of life's spiritual poverty. Therefore, disabled people are weeded from the human landscape. Our world has not adjusted to disabled people. Instead, disabled people are supposed to adjust to everyone else - to overcome their disability. Should the disabled person become frustrated or yield to dispair he or she is classified as being bitter 1 the victim is to blame. It's definitely disabled people's fault that society shuns them, stares at them, asks them stupid and humiliating questions, refuses to hire them, refuses to socialize with them and avoids making love to them. The disabled person is somehow physically or perceptually more inconvenienced than most. That fact inconveniences us, bothers us, upsets us - how dare those disabled people unnerve us in that way? Our entertainment excites us with murder, rape and other violence - lots of action. But please, let's not see those disgusting disabled people. Society is not perceptually maladjusted, not maladaptive, has nothing to overcome. The collective majority, moral and immoral, clings to the edge of the cliff afraid to look around for fear of falling off. If they would chance to look around they would see that the soft ground is but a foot below them. They could release their strained, white knuckled grip. Most disabilities are superficial wounds yet a person's inclination to dwell on the superficial runs deep. Our superficial A ft Xi. ,