I was not suggesting that private business replace government programs. What I am trying to get through, and perhaps need to write more that a brief paragraph to do so, is that the existant institutions are oppressive and need a different orientation. The heads of the government programs who come up with them have not adopted the disability approach "Nothing About Us Without Us" and we have better ideas of what our own needs are. So the paternalism comes in the form of the professional/managerial/medical establishment dictating policy re disabled persons without our involvement. The movement to redirect Medicaid money from nursing homes to in home services is one fight we disabled people originated. Alan Lomax just died in a nursing home. To me that is so sad that his generation did not see that there are better ways to provide services that are needed than these awful institutions we now have.
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> What irks me is the fundamentalist offshoot of that idea (aka
>"political correctness") which holds that calling things differently
>will change the reality itself (e.g. calling the disabled
>"physically challenged"). In my book, such practices belong to the
>same genre as "praying for the less fortunate."
I agree that words will not change much but they do reveal the state we are at, don't they. I mean no one I know uses that term "physically challenged" and the reason is that it puts the burden on the disabled person to adapt to society as it exists. If one is "challenged to succeed" in an inaccessible environment that doesn't make much sense eh? So a silly person came up with that phrase but disabled persons ourselves are not using it, only some people who think it is "PC" use it. It is without basis in our social movement.
marta
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-- Marta Russell Los Angeles, CA http://www.disweb.org