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