sorry

[Gordon Fitch]

Gordon:
> >People who actually deride or discriminate against disabled
> >persons are probably more afraid of them than contemptuous or
> >insensitive, not that this is any reason to tolerate their
> >behavior; but it may suggest different tactics -- affirmative
> >action in preference to hand-wringing and guilt-tripping, for
> >instance.

Marta Russell:
> If disabled people were everywhere out there in the community do you 
> think this fear would disappear?

I would think so.  Or it would at least be reduced.

> One first has to recognize a need for affirmative action.  Notice 
> that hasn't happened (legally) for disabled persons in the way it has 
> for people of color and women.

I remember affirmative action for the disabled in my childhood
and teenage years, in the form of advertising and perhaps more
substantial forms of persuasion.  It was probably an aftereffect
of World War II, when some of the disabled were veterans.  But 
not all.  "Hire the disabled -- it's good business!"  When
was that, the benighted fifties?

--

[ the difficulty of being Left ]

Gordon:
> >It should be easy, shouldn't it?  What seems hard to me is
> >the fear, submission, obedience, self-distrust and self-
> >loathing which authority attempts to inculcate.  Accordingly
> >a Left which promotes guilt and sorrow among its own is not
> >going to get anywhere.  You don't see Marx telling people to
> >feel guilty in the _Communist_Manifesto_.  No, he tells them
> >they have nothing to lose but their chains, and a world to
> >win.

Marta Russell:
> Thats great but you can't win that world without searching for what 
> that world needs to look like first and that means confronting the 
> issues that oppress people -- not just workers, but all people.

Being a wayward youth, I never found oppression hard to
find.  They brought it to me.  When I went out in the world,
it often seemed to me that it was the basic architecture of 
the world. 

Liza Featherstone:
> ... 
> That said, and this specific exchange over the word "lameness" aside, I do
> agree the Left loses a lot of people by emphasizing how much work it is to
> be a leftist, and by making people feel guilty about too many things. I
> think there is a hardcore left faithful that gets off on hard work and
> "guilt and "hand-wringing," but most people are - quite rightly - alienated
> by all that.  Who wants to feel bad about shopping, sexually objectifying
> others, making jokes, or eating tasty food?

I quoted Marx more in a literary-style than a citing-scripture
mode, and I wasn't intending to focus on "worker", which is
something of a contested category anyway.  Rather, I appreciate
Marx's saying, in effect, "Here's something you -- all of you
-- can do for _yourselves_, and for your families and your
friends, and in fact for the whole world, and you can start
now."  Peace, freedom and equality should be more enjoyable
than mere shopping, sexual objectification, etc., should they
not?  (Unless you consider mixing and matching.)  I mean
_serious_ peace, freedom and equality, not the stuff promoted
in the newspapers under their names.


-- Gordon