The Dawning of the New Age of the ADA
by Sue Hodges

It's 1999, one year away from the "New Millenium." It's also the ninth Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act: ADA, the best class Act of the decade. But there are many who feel that we people with Disabilities shouldn't be part of the act. We should know our places, remain humble and grateful to stay at home and receive our monthly dole.

After all, they aren't still putting us away in institutions, are they?

Yep, they are. Of course, those institutions take different forms. Let's take the time-honored institution of work. We get disability benefits because we can't work, right? But if we dare to work, the traditional image becomes jeopardized, and the sworn contract to be a good cripple and stay at home is broken. How can you be disabled and work? If you do, the Supreme Court says you ain't no crip any more. What is THAT about?

People just don't get it about disability. They also don't get it about aging, but that's another story. If this profound, life-transforming experience hasn't happened to them, it is incomprehensible. Problem is, failure to get it has the "sticky key effect," on the folks making laws, on the folks writing regulations for the laws and on the folks enforcing the laws. It's binary, my dear Watson: either we are or we are not disabled. Anything in-between is fraud, abuse, malingering, duplicity or a damned miraculous cure.

That brings us back to our class act, the ADA. ADA is both strong and Frail at the same time. ADA is a law that requires constant vigilance to make sure it doesn't disappear, along with its Constitutional buddies: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

On the eve of the Millenium, we should strongly consider our readiness to preserve this precious law--by taking stock of our level of preparedness for weathering the new attacks that will surely come.

People are gearing up for the beginning of the new millenium with Y2K emergency kits. Our community's Y2K-ADA emergency kits should contain our strongest tools to date: support of each other, awareness of the issues, political organizing, ever-increasing political power, an arsenal of educational tools and bringing up more and more people committed to waging the ongoing battles

. "But I thought we already did this!" I heard someone wail despairingly. As long as there are champions of liberty for some and not for others, equality for some, but others are less deserving, fraternity for some, but others aren't our brothers and sisters, there's going to be big trouble and big work to do. And Baby, we all need to be doing it.

Look back on the remarkable accomplishments of the independent living movement in the last half of this century. Remember those who have pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor so that we might live free far from the state-run institutions of the 1950's. Observe that the built environment is being made to change, and that many of those changes are taken for granted today, such as curb ramps, doorways wide enough to pass through and restrooms that we can actually use. Be aware that closed minds and discriminatory attitudes are changing the old ways that confined and limited thinking about people with disabilities to stereotypes and images of cripples.

It's not enough. It's not enough when 85% of the people in our community who can work aren't employed. It's not enough when we are held hostage to health care benefits that are constantly whittled away. It's not enough when affordable accessible housing is not available to us. It's not enough when acceptance and access continue to require such wrenching and exhausting vigilance on our part. It's not enough when the hard-fought and dearly won victories for public transit and attendant care services to our community are in constant peril. It's not enough when treatment for depression, mental illness and relief of severe chronic pain are withheld or dangled tantalizingly out of our reach. It's not enough when each year we must undergo terrible struggles for inclusion in the State or County or City budget. It's not enough when we live marginalized lives. Marginalized? Yes. Lurking on the periphery of plenty, gazing at what is attainable by hard work and American true grit, qualities we possess and employ in no small measure.

So on this eve of the Great Change, we continue to demand our inclusion to live, to work, to belong, to be free, to be happy. We continue our maintenance of effort, our vigilance, and our diligence to not lose the ground we have gained. We swear our commitment to acquire and to possess all the remaining territory we desire for the fulfillment of our lives and our dreams. And we affirm our love, support and acceptance for each other in all the differing paths we take to achieve our common goals.