Fair Use Lab

Most of the media coverage I heard on the ADA 20th anniversary represented the civil rights law as a landmark in American public life. There were dissenting views, of course. Someone hiding behind the name “fortressdayton” wasted little time in adding this comment to my op-ed piece on the Dayton Daily News Matter of Opinion blog. Disability discrimination is often hard to put your finger on, so I give “fortressdayton” credit for being unfiltered, if mean-spirited:

By fortressdayton

The original author of the ADA, a man confined to a wheelchair, lamented what the ADA has become. He said that, had he known what abuses of personal and property rights would take place in the name of the act, he would never have written the Act. How’s that for a commentary on the ADA? Society had a responsibility to TRY to accomodate its less-gifted citizens, but it is not obliged to do so. The ADA is a legal boondoggle used by attorneys to generate lucrative lawsuits. It needs to go away. Look around Dayton and see how this works out: every corner nearly has a sight-impaired plastic plate. How many sight impaired folks walk around Dayton? The cost is criminal. Braille buttons on drive-thru (!) ATMs. Gimme a break. Thye ADA has put more small restaurants out of business than the Mafia and the economy combined. Why does a mom and pop restaurant need a ramp and a handicapped accessible bathroom for EACH sex? Nonsense. Every welfare recipient seems to have a power chair now, so the problem is epidemic. I say, stop over-regulating in the private sector. If I don’t want to spend 200,000 to make my restaurant handicap-accessible, then that should be my decision. If you accomodate one, then you must, by rights accomodate all. Why do we get to bring assistance animals in food service establishments? What happened to hygiene? Oh, that’s right…the blind have more of a right to bring Fido in than I have a right to maintain food safety. BS!

After reading that, I was ready to reply in kind – but didn’t. Other commenters jumped into the fray, renewing my conviction in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s assertion that the best remedy for speech that we hate is not its proscription, but more speech. Read what they wrote.

The libertarian argument (I’ve got mine, and I’ll step on your neck to keep it) advanced by “fortressdayton” reminded me of Rand Paul’s remarks about the Americans with Disabilities Act after his primary election victory last May in Kentucky. His language sounded reasonable compared to “fortressdayton”, but it conveyed the same sense of paternalism and noblesse oblige: the disabled  don’t need burdensome laws to help them, we know what is best for them. Here is what Rand Paul said on NPR:

I think a lot of things could be handled locally. For example, I think that we should try to do everything we can to allow for people with disabilities and handicaps. You know, we do it in our office with wheelchair ramps and things like that. I think if you have a two-story office and you hire someone who’s handicapped, it might be reasonable to let him have an office on the first floor rather than the government saying you have to have a $100,000 elevator. And I think when you get to solutions like that, the more local the better, and the more common sense the decisions are, rather than having a federal government make those decisions.

President Obama and others speak at an event commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. [Source: whitehose.gov].  This video is in the public domain. Read the transcript.

President George H.W. Bush signs into law the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26, 1990. [Source: ucp.org]

Thanks to Ellen Belcher for publishing this piece today on the Dayton Daily News opinion page and Matter of Opinion blog.

Disabilities Act Still A Work In Progress

by Mark Willis

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Twenty years is significant, not because it’s a round number, but rather, because it represents a generation of experience gained since the law was passed.

Many of us who lobbied for the ADA believed at the time that it could take a generation or more, as it had with the Civil Rights Act before it, to fulfill the ADA’s promise of equal opportunity for Americans with disabilities.

I remember the day 20 years ago tomorrow, July 26, when I went to the White House to watch President George H. W. Bush sign the legislation. The event was held outside on the South Lawn, between the White House and the Ellipse. Everyone had to pass through metal detectors to enter. The Secret Service surely had a crash course in disability awareness, because it was the smoothest security check I ever had.

As I walked through the wrought-iron gate, I looked around and marveled, “Wow, they let me in here!” They let me in, and a thousand other people. We had every kind of disability in the human condition, and we used every kind of assistive device available at the time. I like to think we were the most diverse group of citizens ever gathered together at the White House.

The ADA signing ceremony was held outside, not because it was a beautiful summer day, but because the White House itself was not fully accessible. Many in our diverse group of citizens could not have entered the building. Long gone were the wooden ramps installed five decades earlier to accommodate President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wheelchair.

On its anniversary, pundits will debate what the ADA has accomplished since then. I am no pundit, but I still believe what I said in a TV interview after the signing ceremony. “The ADA will not end disability discrimination overnight. But in a nation governed by the rule of law, getting it in writing is the place to start.”

The Americans with Disabilities Act was an unfinished project at the moment it was signed into law, and it remains an unfinished project today. It depends on all of us, and the work we will do, to carry it to completion.

My own work has been greatly influenced by Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and philosopher of liberation. He taught non-literate poor people how to read by first convincing them that, through the daily work they did with their hands, they had culture and made culture. He believed culture to be an unfinished project that he called “the struggle for human completion.”

Listen to that expansive phrase again. “The struggle for human completion.” That is a worldview large enough to include all of us, whether we have disabilities or not. That is a project in which all of us are engaged. That struggle makes us human.

In the years since the ADA became law, we’ve begun to talk about something called “the culture of disability.” I do not think that disability is a fully evolved culture in the same sense that we speak of Mayan culture or even Deaf Culture. But I do believe that the work of disability is a significant form of cultural production.

By “work of disability,” I mean the daily problem-solving involved in living with a disability — making adaptations and negotiating accommodations — according to principles set forth in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The work of disability is creative work. It’s work that addresses the impairments of individuals, to be sure, but it’s also work that strives to make society more flexible and tolerant. Many of us, disabled and non-disabled, have significant experience with this work, but it seldom shows up on a job resume.

Recently I was invited to talk about the ADA with graduating students with disabilities at Wright State University. I told them, “As you venture forth in the world, you will have to negotiate with people who see the disability, not the person. Some will look at you and see one more hassle, one more problem added to their plate. When I look at you, I don’t see problems. I see problem-solvers.

“So go out there and get it done, this unfinished project called the struggle for human completion. Claim your rightful place in the public sphere. The Americans with Disabilities Act has got your back.”

[This op-ed began as a talk given to graduating students and scholarship winners at the Office of Disability Services reception at Wright State University.]

The U. S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division’s celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act will be held Friday, July 23, 2010 from 10:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. (eastern daylight time).

Shown live from The Great Hall in the Robert F. Kennedy Justice Building, the event will be shown in accessible streaming media and then re-broadcast, on-demand.

Featured speakers will include Attorney General Eric Holder, former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, former Congressman Tony Coelho, and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez.  Their presentations will be followed by a facilitated panel discussion, moderated by Samuel Bagenstos, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, and will include presentations by ADA experts who played significant roles in the development and passage of the ADA:  Bob Burgdorf, Yoshiko Dart, Chai Feldblum, Arlene Mayerson, and Bobby Silverstein.

See the ADA.gov website for links to live/on demand streams:
http://www.ada.gov/2010adacelebration/ada20webcastinfo.htm

I’ve mused for some time about the ways in which the public sphere has been transformed by blogging. I didn’t make an etymological connection between public sphere and blogosphere, though, until I listened to Rebooting the News #56. Jay Rosen spoke several times in that podcast about how the “sphere” of media is changing, and I got the connection, finally. Duh. “Sphere” is the root of both phrases, linguistically, and I would argue that public sphere is conceptually central to the vast hyperlinked network called the blogosphere.

The Wikipedia entry on blogosphere doesn’t say anything like this in its account of the word’s origin:

The term was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke.^[1] It was re-coined in 2002 by William Quick,^[2] and was quickly adopted and propagated by the warblog community. The term resembles the older word logosphere (from Greek logos meaning word, and sphere, interpreted as world), “the world of words”, the universe of discourse.^{[citation needed]}

Despite the term’s humorous intent, CNN, the BBC, and National Public Radio’s programs Morning Edition, Day To Day, and All Things Considered have used it several times to discuss public opinion. A number of media outlets in recent years have started treating the blogosphere as a gauge of public opinion, and it has been cited in both academic and non-academic work as evidence of rising or falling resistance to globalization, voter fatigue, and many other phenomena,^[3] and also in reference to identifying influential bloggers^[4] and “familiar strangers” in the blogosphere.^[5][6]

Rebooting the News #56 is a lively discussion of the rhetorical question, “Is blogging dead?” The interlocutors are Dave Winer, Jay Rosen, and guest Brendan Greeley, who now writes for The Economist about technology and culture. I first knew his work when he was blogger-in-chief for Radio Open Source with Chris Lydon.

The liveliest part of the discussion wasn’t the future of blogging but its history, as experienced by three early practitioners. I listened to the podcast a second time so I could write these notes:

Brendan Greeley is now technology and policy correspondent at The Economist. Similar beats:

Jose Antonio Vargas | Huffington Post | Technology as Anthropology

Evgeny Morozov | Net Effect | FOREIGN POLICY

BG asks “Is blogging dead?”

Attention has moved to FB, that’s where people are.

Cross-blog links are decreasing, Technoratti  traffic has dropped while FB traffic has skyrocketed.

Dave: FB is blogging, why attachment to the word blogging, or to particular software, or form of presentation

Dave never did a Google Blog Search

BG: Could we define blogging as a set of habits?

Dave: natural-born bloggers,

Dave never liked word “blogging” – which he considers a trademark for Blogger software

Dave’s description: “unedited voice of a person”
Which Jay translated as “a person talking with you” – A medium for individuals

Jay’s first look at a blog – InstaPundit.com – didn’t know what he was looking at; appears at first glance to be  like a page from a book, magazine or newspaper, but it’s real power comes from linking to the blogosphere. Blogging is blog + blogosphere.

Concentration of “sphere” into several huge sites, not as decentralized as blogging was originally.

Dave sees this as cyclical ebb and flow of technology.

BG: holy grail of radio: finding voices of real people. Blogs provided a database of what real people thought.

Dave on Twitter search: 140 characters not worth searching for.

Next level of innovation: someone breaks 140-character barrier, and we’re back to blogging!

“Facebook is training wheels for whatever will come next”

Dave: Twitter is a river of news aggregator; notification system and blogging tool, an integrated aggregator and blogging tool. Can you imagine FB or Twitter without RSS?

Blogging was this in 2002, Twitter is now”:
DW: “an integrated aggregator and blogging tool”

Jay: Life cycle: new tools emerge, learning curve, adaptations evolve that shape tools to life rhythms

Dave: Twitter isn’t just an outgrowth of blogging, but also SMS, texting. Esther Dyson predicted this in 1990s when web went so graphic.

All these things are iterations of RSS, river of news systems

Jay: media industries grew up around fixed ideas about how media works, understood attributes as assumptions, as givens – ideas about media thought to be unchanging

Brendan: what we used to call blogging has turned into publishing. Josh Marshall, Andrew Sullivan

Jay: when journalism was professionalized, it came with “de-voicing” of individual journalists. Now a new age of personal journalism – “re-voicing” of American journalism

Dave’s epiphany: writing tool should not be in WP dashboard; something lost with transition from RadioUserland and Manila to WP. He’s working on new blogging software.

Dave: When everyone thinks it’s all locked up, it’s about to blow wide open.

Dave: “Once the users take control, they won’t give it back.”