Daily Archives: 23 April, 2010

Why SF’s Proposed Sit/Lie Laws Are a Terrible Idea

bodies, class issues, invisibility, justice, news, normality, othering, policy, politics, poverty, social attitudes, Uncategorized, violence, , , ,

In San Francisco currently, there is something of a debate brewing about Mayor Newsom’s proposed sit/lie laws, which would make it illegal for anyone to sit or lie on any public curb or street in San Francisco (with a couple of exceptions).

The intersections with disability here are rather clear. For one thing, there are some intersections between homelessness and disability, because some homeless people are, for example, mentally ill or have disabling physical problems. Do either of these things make them unworthy of compassion, or not human? Of course not, but from the way this proposed ordinance is designed, it is, on a very basic level, criminalizing homelessness even more than it is already criminalized (not to mention socially stigmatized), while taking extra “common sense” steps to avoid citing non-homeless people for an offense. Observe the following response to concerns that SF police would begin to crack down on non-homeless people were the laws to go into effect:

During a heated, five-hour Board of Supervisors public safety committee hearing on the issue Monday, Adachi showed photographs of behavior that would be illegal under Newsom’s proposed law: a well-heeled tourist sitting on her luggage as she waits for a cab, a little boy sitting on a sidewalk clutching his skateboard, and tourists sitting on a curb and gazing up at the sights.

Assistant Police Chief Kevin Cashman said all of those people would be warned first to move and that none of them would probably receive a citation.

“Obviously common sense is going to be part of the training with enforcement of this statute,” he said at the hearing.

Ah, yes, “common sense.” Common sense, apparently, still makes the further stigmatization of homeless people de rigeur. Because apparently, they don’t deserve to sit down in public, unlike “well-heeled” tourists and neighborhood residents. I wonder what the response to a person with disabilities — tourist or not — needing to sit down on a public street might be? Someone waiting for an ambulance? While that is approaching a bit of a slippery slope argument (which I generally like to avoid), it is worth considering, simply because “common sense” will mean different things to different people — those whose job it is to enforce the statute included.

Also interesting is the framing of this ordinance in terms of concern for children. From one of the SF Gate articles:

Newsom, who bought a home in the Haight recently, was convinced to support an ordinance after walking along Haight Street with his infant daughter and seeing someone smoking crack and blocking the entrance of a business.

Certainly, children need to be protected from dangerous situations or potentially dangerous situations, but is an ordinance that criminalizes the poor and homeless — not all of whom are recreational drug users or addicts — really the way to do it?

Additionally, nowhere have I seen any plan to increase the number of homeless shelters or services for homeless people attached to this ordinance. The implicit message behind these proposed sit/lie laws seems clear: It’s too bad you’re homeless, but don’t you dare be homeless on our streets, because it might make our city look bad. Oh, and you certainly shouldn’t expect the city to help you not be homeless — even after it cites you for breaking the sit/lie law.

(Cross-posted to ham blog)

Chatterday! Open Thread.

chatterday

This is our weekly Chatterday! open thread. Use this open thread to talk amongst yourselves: feel free to share a link, have a vent, or spread some joy.

What have you been reading or watching lately (remembering spoiler warnings)? What are you proud of this week? What’s made your teeth itch? What’s going on in your part of the world? Got any questions for your fellow FWD commenters?

Today’s chatterday backcloth, a wee baby possum amongst the flowers, comes via The Daily Squee.

little possum looks like it's picking flowers

When Accommodations Conflict

accessibility, disability activism, mental health, policy,

Accommodations can be difficult. Not only for an individual with a disability to identify what accommodation would be relevant or helpful for them, not only convincing whoever to implement the desired accommodation, and not only ensuring that the accommodation continues over time and doesn’t lead to resentment or punishment for the person with a disability. Here is an additional wrinkle – sometimes desired or needed accommodations conflict. What one PWD needs to accommodate her disability could not only not help another PWD, but might actually exacerbate their disability.

Let’s take an example: smoking. For some PWDs, especially those with mental illness, smoking can help ameliorate their symptoms, calm their anxiety, even help some with restoring neurochemical imbalances. The rates of smoking among people with mental illness tend to be much higher than the general population, in which about 20% of people smoke. Here is a chart of smoking rates among PWDs with mental illness:

MENTAL ILLNESS: PERCENTAGE WHO ARE SMOKERS
Bipolar Disorder 70%
Major Depression 60%
Schizophrenia 90%
Panic Disorder 56%
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder 60%

There are lots of theories why people with mental illness smoke. At a recent meditation seminar, the instructor was modeling deep breathing techniques for relaxation and stress reduction. He pointed out that the deep breaths, with an exhale longer than the inhale, breathing from the abdomen, exactly mimicked the breathing of a smoker while inhaling from a cigarette and exhaling smoke. I know people who took up smoking intentionally and specifically in order to help regulate breathing during panic attacks – they report that the 5-7 minutes of regulated breathing during one cigarette is enough to get them through a panic or anxiety attack.

Nicotine, the active ingredient in cigarettes, also acts as a stimulant on the brain. Some report enhanced attention, focus, and concentration, which can be helpful for people with attention or focus problems caused either by their disorders or the medications that treat them. As one study reports: “Certain thinking patterns are affected in schizophrenia including sustained attention, focused attention, working memory, short-term memory, recognition memory and even processes that are preattentive (eg reflexes). Some studies have suggested that there may be improvements in these areas after treatment with nicotine.” Those authors theorize, as have many others, that “it may be that patients “self medicate” to remediate the chemical imbalance in the brain (dopamine hypofunction in the pre-frontal cortex) which may help with certain difficulties with thinking tasks involving this PFC area and might explain why there is smoking persistence in schizophrenia.”

On the flip side, of course, there are many PWD for whom being around smokers or smoke will exacerbate their disabilities and a necessary accommodation is an atmosphere free from smoke. People with asthma and other respiratory problems or people with allergies and chemical sensitivities could be seriously harmed by being around smoke or people who are smoking, and could require an accommodation to be free from smoke exposure.

This sets up the possibility that there could be two PWDs – let’s say one with schizophrenia and one with severe smoke allergies – who require accommodations that are directly conflicting with each other. These situations are much trickier for me than when a PWD is requesting an accommodation that an employer, business, government, or other entity is saying is too difficult or expensive to implement. In those situations, I believe the accommodation rights of the PWD should trump that concern in the vast majority of cases. But handling issues of conflicting accommodations can be much more complicated, because the rule of “you must accommodate PWDs” doesn’t give us any guidance on how to proceed.

This is just one example of desired or needed accommodations that can directly conflict, but there are many others. How do you think these situations should be handled? Have you run into conflicts like this in your own life?

Note: discussions of conflicting accommodations – including the example discussed above – can become very charged and very personal, as readers and commenters may have personal preferences or needs on which accommodation to implement. Please be respectful of the needs of other PWDs in this comment thread. Specifically, comments that imply or state that smokers are inherently evil or people who don’t smoke are inherently intolerant (or similarly bright line rules) will be deleted.

Recommended Reading for April 23, 2010

recommended reading

This is going to be a quick one from me as I’m out of town right now, attending a Graduate Student Conference on Disability Studies, because my life is awesome. I can’t wait to tell everyone all about it, at length.

Disability Blog Carnival 65: Balance is up at The River of Jordan! The posts are, as always, varied and wonderful.

Eyesight to the Blind [Problematic language in title – see Rainbow’s comment]

When my great-aunt says she’ll pray for me, she’s not saying it because there’s something messed up about me that needs fixing. She’s saying it because she prays for the people she loves. The person I encountered today wasn’t saying it to everybody she passed. She probably saw a person using a mobility scooter and thought something like “disabled person = in need of healing”.

What would healing look like for me?

Tributes paid to David Morris

Tributes have been paid to David Morris, much-loved and respected disability campaigner and mayoral adviser, who passed away yesterday (Sunday), aged 51.

Mr Morris, who was on secondment from his role as Senior Policy Advisor on Disability to the Mayor of London, had been working with the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) as External Access and Inclusion Coordinator.

Wild Ride for Number 9

In the end, the name was the same atop the wheelchair division of the Boston Marathon yesterday, but for Ernst Van Dyk it hardly was a typical triumph.

The South African won for a record ninth time, but it was his toughest victory yet. Van Dyk had to surge over the final 2 miles to overtake American Krige Schabort to finish in 1:26:53, a mere 3 seconds ahead of Schabort.

An Open Letter to Charles Tan

When I read your essay you seemed to define promoting cultural diversity by “encouraging people to write about other cultures”. Certainly Buck was encouraged and rewarded – she received a Pulitzer in 1932 and a Nobel Prize in 1938 “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China”. If writing about the Other were such a truly prodigious feat, then surely Vikram Seth should be bestowed with more renown for not one, but two books, set entirely in white people western land?

But transcultural traffic is hardly such an egalitarian affair. You say: “That there is a small but growing awareness of the literature of other cultures is, in my opinion, a liberty that only occurred because of humanity’s continued struggle for “enlightenment” but this flies in the face of a vast body of historical evidence that cultural currency has been a tool of capitalist trade and colonial enterprise. Furthermore, by whose standards are you defining awareness of such literature “small”? There are many Indians who will tell you about Rustam and Sohrab, about Laila and Majnu–stories not actually from our subcontinent. And as Fatemeh Keshavarz points out, Iran has a long history of translating books into Persian.

Follow-up on the Clitoraid post earlier this week: Clitoraid responds to their critics, but key questions remain unanswered

Clitoraid have officially responded to questioning of their organisation and the controversial ‘adopt a clitoris’ fundraising scheme (a summary of discussions to date on this topic can be found here).

On Being Well

Not every disability can be healed. I learned long ago that being “incurable” and being well are possible. But don’t go looking for this anomaly in the rule book. In effect what you need to do is break the rules that have long been established for how to think of being well. I am for instance the best blind sailor in my family. Never mind that I’m the only blind sailor in my family. I did in fact teach my sighted wife how to dock a boat. There’s no rule book for this.

Disability as a Game

In the coming months my children will come to know the terms disablest and able-bodied privilege, because it has become clear to me that while they are empathetic of my personal circumstance because they love me, they are not aware that this very same empathy needs to be extended beyond our little family. Not only do the differently abled have a right to take up space (a struggle they have seen first hand), we deserve not to have our lives mocked for the purposes of entertainment or to deliver a cruel retort.

Top 10 Things That Annoy People in Wheelchairs

In a recent poll done by the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, wheelchair users were asked :

What do family, friends, and strangers do to you when you are using your chair that annoys you?

The Virus-Ridden DNA of Aborted Babies

Well, a new group of people has joined this fight. Rather than being autistic-adults, parents of autistics, or researchers, this group has little personal contact with actual autistic people. Instead, it is one group of pro-life people wanting to use autism as proof of why abortion should be outlawed – never mind that it has no basis in fact!