by Bob Powers, May 18, 1998

Rights of the disabled are not one of those topics that attracts attention. It is human nature to look away. It may be the fact that most "normal" people become uncomfortable in the presence of those who suffer from disabilities. That may be one reason why government today seems ready to abandon the rights that Thomas Jefferson defended.

Jefferson wrote, "The care of human life and happiness, and not destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government." As author Marta Russell observes in her new book, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract (Common Courage Press, $18.95), politicians who support increased spending on the military-industrial complex have begun to question the government's ability to sustain its social contract, which calls for backing "the care of human life and happiness."

In Russell's definition, the social contract covers a wide range of benefits, from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, to the promise of freedom from discrimination as directed by civil rights laws. To Russell, a kinder, gentler nation "means leaner, meaner 'tough love' where Social Security offices in the Midwest beef up security forces in anticipation of hostile reaction to welfare cuts, and lethal weapons are unabashedly our number one profit-making export."

She believes that most people in the U.S. are in "deep economic pain . . . regardless of what the business pages and Washington politicians tell us." Despite record low unemployment, we read daily about company mergers that inevitably result in "downsizing," that prissy word that means thousands upon thousands of workers are losing their jobs. Sure, lots of people are working, often at two and three jobs, because wages are so low that it takes 80-hour weeks at work just to subsist.

Russell, a TV producer and photographer, herself is disabled from birth. She says she began to write about disability issues when her disability began to progress and she "had to navigate the disability policy netherworld to survive." In Beyond Ramps, she has done excellent work in showing how concepts of normalcy have been used for social control, "to demean and devalue." In a book reeking with indignation, she examines how social policies underlie economic oppression. She questions the wisdom of using work as the measure of human worth and whether civil rights alone can create the economic equality that is our goal.

Writing about the money model of disability, she observes that "the disabled human being is a commodity around which social policies are created or rejected based on their market value." The disabled have become big business, and that accounts for the push toward more patients being put into nursing homes. "Disabled people are 'worth' more to the Gross Domestic Product when we occupy a 'bed' instead of a home."

In Russell's view, the corporate state "has all but wiped out any chance to realize the promise of democracy made in Philadelphia. A 'democracy' controlled by the money of the few is contradictory to majority rule and to minority representation; it is no democracy at all."

At the conclusion of this hard-hitting treatise, Russell offers what she calls the "Manifesto of an Uppity Crip," which calls for democratic control, corporate accountability, campaign finance reform, a reduction in corporate subsidies, electoral reform, and participative democracy. She continues with a lengthy list of goals, including government accountability, environmentally sustainable development, and decorporatizing the media.

Russell's analysis is sharp edged and will raise a few eyebrows among the unenlightened. Her call for action should be answered. She says that we are "dangerously close to a Jerry Lewis democracy where middleman beggars and corporate CEO's getting huge paychecks may replace entitlements with charity."

And that's truly scary.

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